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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNeed help with surreptitous recording apps for Android
My Blackberry recently bit the dust and I switched over to a phone with Android. So I have a lot more apps at my disposal than before. I am looking for a good police encounter app.
Backstory:
A couple of years ago, I was the victim of a hit-and-run in a bad part of town. I followed the guy (dumb, I know) until I saw a policeman on the side of the road writing a ticket. I pulled in behind him and told him what had happened. He did not handle it himself, but called it in and told me to wait for another officer to show up. So I sat in my vehicle and kept it running. Eventually that policeman left and I sat there alone for about 10 minutes.
The second officer shows up. I turn off my engine, roll down the window, and wave. He comes over and I can tell he's pissed right from the jump. Now bear in mind I am Mr. Yes Sir and Mr. No Sir when dealing with police. I am polite almost to a fault.
He asked me "what a white motherfucker was doing in this neighborhood." I was taken aback, but I told him I worked in this neighborhood and was on the way home from work. He asked me if I was buying drugs. I told him no. Then he asked how I came to be in this particular spot if my hit-and-run was a few blocks away. I told him about following the guy and stopping when I came across another cop.
This guy became completely unhinged. Called me a "dumb motherfucker" (probably true), berated me for awhile, and eventually got to the heart of the problem, it was "the end of (his) shift", and he couldn't believe he was being delayed to help a "white motherfucker who didn't have sense enough to be in the right neighborhood." I got angry at this point and told him if I was going to call him Sir the least he could do was to call me Mr. (name) or anything but "motherfucker."
He tossed me in the back of his squad car and kept me there for 20 minutes grilling me about drugs and a bunch of irrelevant crap. His demeanor swung back and forth from mad to crazy the whole time. I finally just stopped talking, as he was just goading me at that point. Eventually he wound down, I asked if I was free to go, and was allowed to leave.
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Now, all that being said, I understand there are things I did wrong during that encounter such as not asserting my rights properly and such. But I would have killed to have an app that would have recorded the encounter and in a perfect world, done a live upload to prevent it from being deleted.
Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? I am familiar with the one that the NJ ACLU put out but would like to know if there are any others that DUers recommend.
Sorry about the long story, but I thought it was relevant.
Hard Assets
(274 posts)that has the ability to record aurally as well as visually.
Xithras
(16,191 posts)It was called Police Tape, or something like that.
I have an app on my phone called Tape A Talk that I use for recording lectures, but it would also probably work fine for something like that. If you launch the recorder and return to the home screen, it would be difficult for anyone to tell that the phone was actively recording.
reflection
(6,286 posts)Much appreciated.
reflection
(6,286 posts)I have downloaded Bambuser. It's a pretty clean interface, and will run in the background if I lock the phone (it's password protected). It will not upload video on the fly, but since the phone would be locked, the only way I lose my video is if it gets wiped by the police.