OP/ED

ONE MAN’S TRASH...

This entire year has been one where the debate has raged over where your rights begin and mine end and vice versa. I personally think it’s been exhausting trying to mesh together the fact that I know you have rights and I know I have rights. My faith tells me that I’m supposed to put you first, but man, is that tough sometimes!

I could write an entire column on my thoughts on personal rights when it comes to masks, guns, reproduction, free speech, race/gender/sexual orientation or 100 other topics that would make me feel better for having expressed my opinion, but I think I’ll stick to something a little less controversial - landowner rights.

I know when you hear the phrase “landowner” you might get a picture in your mind of someone owning a farm or ranch; perhaps you think about the issue of corporate hog farms or the debate over wind turbines, but the landowners I’m talking about today are those who live in town, with neighbors next door or across the street. Those landowners have rights, too and never have I been more aware of that than at meetings of the Trenton Building and Nuisance Board.

I have only been covering the meetings of that board since January, but I’ve covered the Trenton Municipal Court for almost three decades. I know nuisances have always been a problem and will most likely always be a problem. I can tell you that this board is frustrated that it seems like their hands are tied when it comes to pressuring someone to clean up their property. I’m not talking about high grass and weeds. I’m talking about property that has appliances, furniture, mattresses, etc., sitting all over the yard. If you can’t picture it, just look at the front page of the Friday, May 28 Republican-Times. You don’t need to imagine what some of these properties look like - we showed you. I’ve been looking at that property now and then since November and I feel really sorry for the people who have had to see it every time they stepped out of their front door. The good news is that after receiving a summons for the first time on Nov. 3, 2020 the property was (mostly) cleaned up in time for a court appearance on Tuesday. Yes, this past Tuesday, June 1, 2021. At that point, a guilty plea was entered and the defendant was ordered to pay a fine of $150 and $41.50 costs. It only took seven months for that property owner to do what I’m pretty sure I could have done in a long weekend - which is what they did over the Memorial Day weekend.

The board is frustrated because tickets get issued and cases remain in court for months. Actually, one case involving a building code violation has been in court since Dec. 7, 2017. The house, which sits very close to the property line of a house that is on the National Register of Historic Places, is falling down. I’m certain it’s condition affected the selling price of that historic property when it went on the market last year. So, does the owner of the delapidated house have the right to infringe on the rights of the homeowner who has kept their property in good repair and their yard cleaned up? I was recently told that a house that has been vacant and in disrepair in my neighborhood for years (and has a family of groundhogs living high on the hog in it) won’t get torn down this year even though it’s on the demolition list because the property owner won’t pay their share of the demo cost. Talk about disappointment. The question is how do you make it less advantageous for the owner to just let the property sit there than to chip in part of the demolition cost and have it gone?

There has been talk of possibly following what the city ordinance says can happen - that the city can send someone onto the property to remove the offending items and clean up the property and then put the cost of the cleanup on the property owner’s tax bill. But that’s more complicated than it sounds: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, more importantly, is it worth someone possibly getting hurt trying to remove the junk from an angry property owner who sees the value in the scrap metal sitting all over their yard?

Members of the Building and Nuisance Board have been told that the municipal court has its hands tied due to changes in state statute. The question has been asked many times “so why do we even have this board if we can’t do anything?”

That’s a good question.

Trenton Republican-Times Body Cameras Help Monitor Police, But Can Invade People’s Privacy

by Bryce C. Newell, University of Oregon

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. It can be found at http://bit.ly/TCUSinfo)

In the course of their work, police officers encounter people who are intoxicated, distressed, injured or abused. The officers routinely ask for key identifying information like addresses, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers, and they frequently enter people’s homes and other private spaces. GUEST EDITORIAL

With the advent of police body cameras, this information is often captured in police video recordings – which some states’ openrecords laws make available to the public.

Starting in the summer of 2014, as part of research on police adoption of body-worn cameras within two agencies in Washington state, I spent hours riding in patrol vehicles, hanging out at police stations, interviewing officers, observing police officers while they worked and administering surveys.

One of the most striking findings of my study was about the unintended effects of these cameras and associated laws. Bodyworn cameras and freedom of information laws do enable oversight and accountability of the police. But, as I outline in my new book, “Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras,” they also hold the potential to force sensitive data and stressful episodes in private citizens’ lives into public view, easily accessible online. Accountability, with visibility

Body-worn cameras have been issued to police all over the United States, with a patchwork of regulations and laws governing their operation and the video they record. The goal is often to make officers accountable for their actions, though their effectiveness at doing so has been questioned.

Opinions and laws also differ on when body camera footage should be made public. And, even when it is, interpreting what the footage depicts can be complicated. Nevertheless, the cameras have the potential to make police work, including misconduct and police violence, more visible.

I found that within weeks of adopting body-worn cameras, the police agencies I studied began receiving requests under local and state public records laws, seeking all of the footage recorded. In response, the departments began to release the videos, under the provisions of state public records laws with few – if any – redactions to protect citizens’ sensitive personal information. The primary instigator of these initial requests posted the disclosed video to a publicly accessible YouTube channel.

One patrol officer told me, “I personally would never provide my personal information to an officer with a camera. It all ends up on the internet. That is wrong and unsafe.” ‘Say hi to the camera, honey!’

One winter afternoon in 2015, I accompanied a Spokane, Washington police officer on a domestic violence call. After parking by the curb, we walked up the driveway to where a man was standing.

The officer I was shadowing turned on his body camera and informed the man that he had activated his camera and would be recording their conversation.

The man we had approached yelled down the driveway to his wife, “Smile and say hi to the camera, honey!”

The woman had allegedly taken a metal baseball bat and smashed in the man’s face across his eye. He had blood leaking from his eye and eyebrow and rolling down his nose and cheek. His eyebrow looked caved in; the bone was obviously broken. After a few minutes of questioning, the medics arrived and quickly rushed him to the ambulance.

The officer and I followed them to the ambulance, where the officer continued to question the injured man, seeking to get a statement or confession out of him on camera. His body camera continued to record everything in front of the officer, including the man and the inside of the ambulance.

When the ambulance left, we entered the home, where the woman was being questioned. The officer continued to record in case the woman might offer her own statement or confession.

Although much of what was recorded on the officer’s camera in this case occurred outside, within view of neighbors and others present on the street, it still was a traumatic, personal and embarrassing moment in the lives of both victim and alleged offender.

But the fact that a camera recorded it made these events much more visible, to a wider audience, for a longer time. Officers sometimes showed each other videos at the end of their shifts while writing reports, often to simply decompress after a long shift or bond with their colleagues. In addition, the footage could potentially become public under state open records laws at the time it was recorded. ‘Maybe I should stop drinking’

On another winter evening, I found myself standing inside another couple’s living room with two officers as the man and woman, separately, tried to explain why the wife had called 911 and accused the husband of threatening violence.

The husband was drunk – and drinking continuously while talking to the officer, who was wearing a camera on his chest. He told a rambling story about how much trouble his wife had caused him over the years, musing that perhaps he should leave her and move on, but perhaps he loves her. On the other hand, he said, she had caused him nothing but grief and made his life miserable. Moments later, he continued, “Maybe what I really should do is stop drinking,” and he took another sip from his beer can.

Even if he had been sober, he probably would not have realized that this conversation might end up on YouTube with virtually unlimited visibility. If he had, would he or his wife have let the police into their house in the first place? Would the wife even have called to report her husband’s threats?

There are potential social costs to deploying body-worn cameras, including possible invasions of privacy when sensitive moments are recorded or made public, and increasing police surveillance of communities already subjected to heightened police attention. When body cameras are introduced, careful attention to existing laws and policies, including public records laws, can help minimize harm to the public while increasing the transparency of police work.

As I discuss in my book, one possible solution could be redacting personal information about victims, witnesses, bystanders and even suspects, as long as it is not related to law enforcement officer conduct. Other options include creating independent oversight groups to review footage before its release, giving victims and their families access to footage, and erring on the side of nondisclosure when body cameras record in private spaces or in particularly sensitive contexts.

I believe these are possible without limiting public access to procedural information about how officers conduct their activities, to enable oversight and accountability.

Just as videos of Black people’s deaths at the hands of the police should be treated with more care, the decision to make police video that captures sensitive and traumatic moments of people’s lives public should be a measured and considered one. In my view, there is little need to force civilians onto the public stage simply because they are contacted by a police officer.