Pixiq

Actually, this is pretty clever. Think about it… You want to bring suit against the city for false arrest, you first get the cop disciplined – or fired. In this case, he will probably be fired. THEN you file suit, and it is a slam dunk.

One party was leaving the scene of an accident (which you can’t do even if the cop forgets to tell you not to leave) assisted by someone else. The officer does have the right to freeze the action and detain both for up to 20 minutes (or more, depending on the state).

Its literally called “freezing the action” and is something any officer can do in order to make sense out of a scene since most humans need a little time to process everything they see, especially at the site of an incident.

The complaint is sound, the officer should not have deleted photos, moreover, the officer should have (and would have been within his rights to) pat both down and hold and examine the complainants phone, because it could hold evidence that the man involved in the accident orchestrated an illegal exit (thus implicating the complainant).

What we are dealing with is a cop who could not wait to get back to facebook and made several poor decisions. One of them, deleting photos.
Tim Post´s last blog ..But I Just HAD A Vacation!

Oh no Tim! You just suggested that the police have the authority to seize a person’s personal property to safeguard evidence of a crime! Silly rabbit.

Let the foaming of the mouths start…..now!

Don’t agree with the cop detaining the friend of the accident runner and by extension of that confiscating his camera.

Tim Post is wrong, sorry Johnny, you lose again.

A classic photo would be of Johnny Law commenting on my blog while on duty. I would pay for that.

I would also defend JL’s use of the internet while on duty.

Yeah I personally don’t care the cop was on facebook, it’s a moot point. The stupid thing is that the IA is taking that seriously. That’s what happens in Orwellian bureaucracies though. Reminds me of Brazil.

Hey if you are on your lunch break and want to use your iPhone to update Facebook, I don’t see the problem with that. However checkig facebook while working an accident is just stupid.

He also crossed the line by deleting the photos. He was slacking off and got caught. I do think he should be punished for this.

Deleted photos can be recovered.

The photo data is still on the memory card.

The key is to shut off the camera. Don’t take any more pictures. You need to make sure that a new photo is not written over the top of the deleted photo.

There could be an informational page on this site to explain how to undelete photos. A person with reasonable computer skills can do it.

In many of these stories it would be fun to see the photo that was deemed so embarrassing or compromising that it had to be deleted.

Way back when I saw a cop outside of a club in his cruiser looking at the website I used to run at the time. A) I was surprised they had unfettered internet acccess, and B) It was good for a laugh.

Though with A), he probably had a 2006 version of today’s 3G dongle, and wasn’t using the PD’s comm net to go online.
pod´s last blog ..WMC 2009

“There could be an informational page on this site to explain how to undelete photos. A person with reasonable computer skills can do it. ”

That, or prominent links to resources for same. It would be in keeping with the core of the site, I think.

Not a bad idea.

I don’t think you can do that on a cell phone camera.

Undelte photos from an iphone, google Disk Doctors Undelete .
Dallascaper´s last blog ..Setting Up Christmas in the City

you can recover deleted photos off of a cell phone if your photos are being saved to a memory card when you take them. then just take the card out, plug it into a usb card reader and use the recovery software. overwise if you have an old phone you’d have to get a usb adapter cable to plug the phone into the comp w/…

Most cell phones (actually, almost all portable devices) use an implementation of FAT16 or FAT32 for storage.

Deleting a file merely marks the space it occupied as available. So, if you don’t write any more data to the device, you can (99% of the time) recover anything that was deleted.

The thing is, a lot of phones make several small writes to the storage card before they power down, so removing the media first may be in order.
Tim Post´s last blog ..But I Just HAD A Vacation!

Its not _that_ the cop confiscated the phone, its _why_ the cop confiscated the phone that I take issue with. If the cop had reasonable suspicion that the complainant texted / called a friend to come help him illegally leave the scene, he’s well within his limits to take the phone. That’s just preserving evidence of a crime that the cop witnessed in progress. Yes, leaving the scene of an accident is a crime, so is assisting someone trying to leave the scene of an accident.

The fact that he took the phone just to ‘save face for being on facebook’ is what angers me, as well as the destruction of the person’s private property.
Tim Post´s last blog ..But I Just HAD A Vacation!

>>Oh no Tim! You just suggested that the police have the authority to seize a person’s personal property to safeguard evidence of a crime! Silly rabbit.<<<

I'd never suggest different. I have nothing but respect for any Officer that does his job. However when he starts deleting images of evidence of said crime than he himself has committed a crime, called Destruction of Evidence.
Any Judge SHOULD weigh the testimony of one over the other. Personally, I'm more inclined to listen to one who tried to protect the evidence over the one who tried to destroy it. Civilian or Cop don't matter.

First, the guy trying to leave the scene is properly detained, then arrested.

Second, the guy apparently trying to help him illegally leave the scene is detained, then arrested.

Finally, seizing the camera is perfectly legal incident to the arrest.

However, he can’t seize the camera just because it may have evidence of a crime (see cases cited in earlier discussion) and he can’t view the pictures after seizing the camera incident to the arrest and he can never ever delete them.

Seems pretty straight-forward to me.