Blue LIES matter: In light of the propensity of police, and the organizations that pretend to investigate them, to lie to protect themselves, we need the right to record at all times. Getting the video live streamed to a remote server is critical; there have been so many incidents of police confiscating evidence and destroying it. Facebook is a good solution, but the ability to start the recording with a mere shake of the phone and to record stealthily is important. Apps such as https://www.aclu-nj.org/news/2015/11/13/aclu-nj-launches-mobile-justice-smartphone-app are a good start, but the video needs to get out to a wide audience quickly as it did in the Philando Castile case using Facebook. We also need honest investigation. The Professional Standards Departments of UK police forces are worse than useless, they view their purpose as frustrating valid complaints. Society needs to demonize Police Lying, and punish it severely. Politicians such as the Police and Crime Commissioners in the UK should be removed from office quickly when they refuse to control their police forces or hold their Professional Standards Departments to account.

In the UK there are already laws on the books that criminalize Police Lying. For example there is perversion of justice, which carries a potential life sentence. But CPS will never act against police officers. They feed from the same trough. They will never turn on their own breed. Worse yet CPS have the power to take over any criminal case brought by the public and shut it down, or simply let it languish forever. I believe that the law should be changed so that if CPS takes over a criminal case brought by a member of the public they should only be allowed 90 days to pursue it. If they fail to make enthusiastic progress in 90 days then the case should be handed back to whoever initiated it. The public should be able to effectively prosecute the police.

When we hear about torture these days it is usually painful physical torture: Water-boarding, stress positions, cattle prods applied to the genitals and similar techniques. We also hear of psychological torture methods: The victim is blindfolded with a hood over their head and German Shepard dogs made to bark and growl in close proximity to their bodies, verbal threats to hurt their families, and other methods of a similar nature. But, there is a light weight version of torture practised by most governments around the world. An example from the UK: someone is arrested, they are told that they have 2 choices. They can make a false confession and get a caution, walk out of the police station right now and get on with their lives. Or, they can insist on their innocence, go to magistrates court, refused bail, and be remanded into the prison system for at least 12 weeks waiting for their substantive case to be heard. They will share a cell with at least one other inmate, have to use the toilet in front of their cell mate, feel physically sick while their cell mates use the toilet in a confined unventilated space causing a foul stench that lasts for hours. During these 3 months they will lose their job on the outside, their rent/mortgage will not be paid, they may be evicted from their home, and all their possessions lost or destroyed. This technique gets a lot of false confessions. It is used many times everyday in the United Kingdom. The system has no interest in truth or justice, only in optimizing OBTJ statistics. Is this torture? I say it is.