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April 2021
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Months After Violent NYPD Responses To Protests Resulted In Hundreds Of Complaints, Only Two Officers Are Facing Serious Discipline

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The repeal of a law that shielded New York police misconduct records from public view has prompted a delayed deluge of records -- one temporarily slowed by the expected litigation from police and police reps who wished to put this transparency genie back in the bottle.The records confirmed what has always been suspected: the NYPD doesn't like to discipline its officers and the Civilian Complaint Review Board is pretty much powerless when it comes to police accountability. ProPublica -- one of the early publishers of NYPD misconduct records -- has obtained more information from the CCRB. This batch of info -- aided by the CCRB's own publication of misconduct data -- shows it hasn't done much to handle the influx of complaints following the NYPD's response to a number of Black Lives Matter protests.

Nine months after racial justice protests swept across New York City and videos showed police punching, kicking and trapping demonstrators, the city agency responsible for investigating abuses has revealed the number of officers who have so far faced serious disciplinary charges.Two.The Civilian Complaint Review Board released the figures on Tuesday after ProPublica reported that the CCRB was declining to disclose how much progress it had made on protest cases. The new numbers show about 60% of the agency’s 297 protest-related cases are still open.
A lot of this is not the CCRB's fault. It takes a long time to complete investigations -- an average of eight months according to CCRB data. Things could be expedited, but it would take cooperation from the NYPD. That's something the CCRB has never experienced.
Despite its legal obligations, the NYPD has been withholding significant evidence and undermining investigations of alleged abuse. It has stopped sharing a wide variety of paper records and has been redacting the names of potential witnesses from others without explanation. For two months this year, it allowed officers to refuse to be interviewed by CCRB investigators. And, critically, it often doesn’t produce body-worn camera footage.An internal CCRB memo obtained by ProPublica enumerates roughly a dozen kinds of records withheld or redacted across the board: warrants, arrests records, documents listing who was in station house cells — key for finding witnesses — even officer injury reports.
Body camera footage is essential to substantiating claims. The NYPD knows this. That's why it does everything it can to prevent it from being obtained by its civilian oversight. As ProPublica pointed out in that report, substantiation of allegations more than doubles when investigators have access to recordings.That's what's keeping the CCRB from being effective. And that's how you end up with only two substantiated claims and a majority of investigations still open months after the alleged events.But what can the CCRB do? Not much, apparently. It has no power to compel production. And even if it could compel production of recordings and paperwork, the NYPD could still thwart it by doing what it already does: deliberately avoid creating paper trails.
The CCRB’s statement Wednesday also said investigators have had difficulty identifying officers “due to the Police Department not keeping track of where officers were deployed and due to officers wearing protective gear with incorrect shield numbers.”
It's intentional internal mismanagement. It's a protective shield disguised as incompetence. If the city cared, it could do something about this. But the NYPD runs the city, not vice versa. And it has done so for years with the full support of mayors who have pretty much idolized "New York's Finest," elevating them above the accountability they owe to the people they serve.

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posted at: 12:00am on 01-Apr-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Content Moderation Case Study: Automated Copyright Takedown Bot Goes Haywire (2018)

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Summary: For years, Google and YouTube have included a trusted flagger program by which certain entities that have shown they are particularly effective at notifying YouTube of content violations are given more powerful tools with which to do so.This is used often in the copyright context, and companies with a good history may be given access to things like bulk flagging tools and priority review of flagged content. One such trusted flagger for copyright was a company called Topple Track, which offered an automated service for musicians, searching the internet for infringing works and dashing off automated DMCA notices.In May of 2015, digital music distribution company Symphonic purchased Topple Track, but appeared to keep the service running under its own brand.

In the summer of 2018, some people noticed that Topple Track's automated DMCA notices appeared to go a bit haywire, sending DMCA notices for all kinds of perfectly legitimate content. Among those targeted with DMCA notices were the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Bar Association, NYU's Law Review, the Crunchbase article about the company MP3Tunes and many, many more -- including many artists' own web stores. EFF's summary of the wild takedowns gives a sample
Among others, these notices improperly target:Other targets include an article about the DMCA in the NYU Law Review, an NBC News article about anti-virus scams, a Variety article about the Drake-Pusha T feud, and the lyrics to 'Happier' at Ed Sheeran's official website. It goes on and on.
EFF published an article about this and noted that it seemed as yet another example of an automated DMCA reporting bot running amok. The group also questioned why such a company was in Google's trusted flagger program.Decisions to be made by Google / YouTube:
  • What qualifications are there for a partner to be considered a trusted flagger?
  • How often are trusted flaggers reviewed to make sure they still belong in the program?
  • What does it take to get a trusted flagger removed from the program?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • With more emphasis on the speed of removals, it is often tempting for regulators to promote trusted flagging or priority accounts that are able to get content removed at a much quicker pace. What are the benefits and risks of such programs?
  • Automated flagging and now AI/Machine Learning flagging are increasingly a part of the content moderation landscape. How are they calibrated? How frequently are they reviewed?
  • What should the response be when an automated bot is flagging many accounts mistakenly?
Resolution: After the EFF published its article about Topple Track, the parent company Symphonic Distribution apologized to the organization, saying: bugs within the system that resulted in many whitelisted domains receiving these notices unintentionally. As EFF pointed out in response, this seemed difficult to believe, seeing as the problem was not simply a mistake in domains that shouldn't have been scanned, but simply claiming stuff that had nothing to do with the underlying copyright-covered material.A few weeks after the article, YouTube also told EFF that Topple Track had been removed from its Trusted Flagger program, due to a pattern of problematic notices. Some time after this, Topple Track, as a unique organization appeared to disappear, and the service and technology have apparently been subsumed into Symphonic Distribution's catalog of services.Originally published on the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

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posted at: 12:00am on 01-Apr-2021
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