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Montreal Union Wants a Camera On Every Policeman's Uniform
An anonymous reader writes "The Montreal Policemen's Brotherhood is proposing that officers be equipped with uniform-mounted cameras that can be used to record various interactions. The union says in other jurisdictions where police officers are equipped with point-of-view cameras, the use of force by officers and assaults on officers drops by as much as 60%. One system is currently being tested in Edmonton, Alberta."
...facing which way?
They only record in French.
rewriting history since 2109
The system turns itself off when the taser comes out of its holster.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That camera must be one powerful weapon if it has caused such a great reduction in "assaults on officers." I don't suppose it could be that they were making shit up, and now find it more difficult to do so with video evidence? Could this be extrapolated to suggest that a majority of "resisting arrest" charges are entirely bogus?
Started about a year ago. They are turned on when the shift starts and can't be turned off until the shift has ended.
Mounted on a hat above the right ear and they have sound.
Indiana, by the way.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
As long as there are penalties for 'losing' key footage. Whether by the officer or higher in the chain of command. Otherwise it becomes a selective evidence tool that is easily biased.
Silence is a state of mime.
In the two recent Canadian Police Brutality events, the police DID have cameras on their uniforms.
They turned them off until after the attack was over.
What if they need to use the restroom?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
All footage is automatically and continually uploaded to servers located in a branch of government with a vested interest in preservation of the footage.
There is no power switch, it is always on, self contained and hardened against direct access without custom, specialized tools.
Any time footage is "missing", the officer is automatically suspended with pay pending an investigation. If it's determined to be a genuine malfunction, the officer can resume work. If it can be reasonably demonstrated, however, that the officer deliberately disabled, tampered with or obstructed the device, they should be forced to pay back any wages received during the suspension and charged for tampering with evidence.
But, really, who am I kidding... in reality, this will be no different than dash cams in every cruiser. Any time there is a hint of officer abuse or brutality, the footage will be mysteriously and conveniently "unavailable", there will be no real oversight to the whereabouts and, "yes, your honor, the camera just happened to malfunction during the exact time of the brutality accusations against me," will be accepted by the courts.
Until we have real oversight by people who genuinely have the public interest in mind over their own, this won't change anything.
the use of force by officers and assaults on officers drops by as much as 60%
Uh huh, and do you know why that is? That's because if you annoy a cop, you get charged with "assault on a police officer" even if you didn't touch them. With a video recorder serving as a witness, the cops know they can't engage in what is commonly called "testilying."
In my city, the charges cops love to slap anyone they don't like with include AOAPO and "disturbing the peace" - the latter of which basically consists of "a crowd gathered because of you."
I knew someone - a sub-5-foot-tall, sub-100-lb girl - whose birthday party was ended by cops because it was too loud. Fair enough. She provides her information to one cop, and then a second cop comes in and asks her for her personal information again a few minutes later. She asks him why - she just gave it to the other cop. He refuses to say why, and she asks him again why he can't get the information from the other cop.
Next thing she remembers, her head is slammed on the countertop and she's in cuffs. Spent the night in jail, and the next day in court answering charges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer.
The judge looks at her, then looks at the cop, who's a burly nearly-6-foot-tall dude, then looks at the charges and says "Seriously? SHE resisted arrest and assaulted YOU? You've got to be kidding me. Dismissed."
Wasted thousands of dollars in legal fees, because some dickhead cop broke the law and filed false charges, lied in his report, and lied in court.
Please help metamoderate.
As somebody who frequently works with law enforcement, they get blamed for a lot of ridiculous (and completely false) stuff - I've seen officers get accused of assaults (and then exonerated when surveillance footage from a building shows they didn't even touch the suspect). A lot of our officers just recently got uniform-mounted cameras and the footage always shows that the complaints are completely unfounded.
That demonstrates premeditation in whatever follows.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dominion of Canada... constitutional monarchy.
But I expect he was, badly, trying to make a comparison to the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea or some such. What really tips his hand that he's not actually a Canadian is that the question that shows up on job applications in this country is "have you ever been convicted of an offense for which a pardon has not been granted." It's ridiculously easy to get a pardon in this country, an issue which has been the subject of national-level debate in parliament. If he's too stupid to fill out a form and wait 6-8 weeks for his pardon to come through, then he deserves to be flipping burgers, which is a job where they don't even ask that question.
Simply having been accused and acquitted of a crime is *not* grounds for refusing to hire somebody and doesn't even show up on a normal background check. There's absolutely no reason to mention it during the hiring process.
Besides which, most employers won't actually deny you a job if you answer "yes" to that question. They just want to know about it going into it. We had to let somebody go a few months ago because he'd lied and put "no" after having been convicted of fraud, and the irony is that if he had simply said "yes", it wouldn't have affected his eligibility for the job. I guess it's not fraud if you're honest about it. ;)
The union says in other jurisdictions where police officers are equipped with point-of-view cameras, the use of force by officers and assaults on officers drops by as much as 60%.
That's a meaningless "statistic", because it's actually two statistics combined. How much did "the use of force by officers" drop by and how much did "assaults on officers" drop by? Considering how much the police love to be monitored when on duty, I wouldn't trust any proposal like this coming from a police union.
I'm sorry that your significant other was silly enough not to be able to deal with what the life has served you both. I can't understand such relationships. If you're not in "it" together, then what's the point? Lower taxes?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Have gnu, will travel.
Spent the night in jail, and the next day in court answering charges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer.
Something very similar happened to me. The cop even charged me with assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. A much more serious charge. A felony which could have resulted in many years in prison. Because beating me nearly to death just wasn't sufficient apparently. That deadly weapon charge mysteriously vanished when I appeared in court.
The judge looks at her, then looks at the cop, who's a burly nearly-6-foot-tall dude, then looks at the charges and says "Seriously? SHE resisted arrest and assaulted YOU? You've got to be kidding me. Dismissed."
Unfortunately, being male, I didn't get any such leniency from the judge and now I have "assault and battery on a police officer" on my record. In addition to every other contempt of cop charge the asshole could think of. I wasn't found guilty. I pleaded something similar to "no contest" because the plea bargain offer had no jail time. Just probation and a small fine. I paid thousands in legal fees and have lingering memory problems as a result of the beating I received.
Since my contact with the police was due to a roadblock, I plan to either move to one of the few states where such things are illegal or leave the country entirely for a place where the police are not so violent and dangerous.
If only the cop who beat me had been forced to wear a camera which was required to be on for any of the common contempt of cop charges to be allowed I would have been saved at least from the false charges. I would probably still have been severely injured or even killed but that would have been the end of it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
There is no citation or evidence provided that this would be how the system works. If you believe that is something the police might want, fine, but that is different than claiming it is.
Something isn't "insightful" because you want to agree with it.
Basically a law saying that if a police officer is supposed to have a camera running on something, and that footage is unavailable for whatever reason, then their testimony is excluded. So if they are giving testimony about a time when they don't have a camera and aren't supposed to, like they are off duty, then their testimony is treated like the testimony of any other person. However if they were supposed to have a camera at the time and the footage is gone, well then they can't offer any testimony as to what happened during that time.
It would give strong incentive to keep them on and running, and make sure the footage is kept. Otherwise, cases would get lost due to lack of evidence.
They actually stopped giving pardons and replaced it with some other Harper program that still allows people to see that you have been convicted of something. The old process took 6 months to a year to complete btw, and cost a few hundred. The new one cost over $700. This current government would rather have people unable to rejoin society after a criminal conviction as they have strong ties to US jail profiteers and are planning to privatize Canadian prisons as well. (I AM Canadian and in government)
I'd agree with this on three conditions:
The union says in other jurisdictions where police officers are equipped with point-of-view cameras, the use of force by officers and assaults on officers drops by as much as 60%.
This sort of tells us what we already knew. That basically most of the force police use already is applied illegally applied or over-applied. The camera is forcing police to act more ethically, which reduces their use of force, but also hints that they widely act unethically at present. It isn't unique to Canada.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Something like that seems reasonable enough. And if the camera footage is stopped other than as the officer walks into somewhere you would legitimately expect camera footage to be stopped, fall back to whatever presumption of tainted evidence position you would otherwise take if the camera "fell off accidentally" etc.
Alternatively, any officer can turn their own recording equipment off but it will make a clearly audible noise while disabled so they can't forget to turn it back on again and anyone they approach will know that recording is disabled. Only their shift supervisor or other responsible senior officer can turn the device on at the start of the shift and fully off again at the end. And to prevent tampering, any officer whose equipment isn't making proper noises at both the start and end of a shift is in trouble if they didn't call it in and return to base for a replacement immediately.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yes, I did notice it. I'm not sure if you are familiar with police practices, but "assault on an officer" is often used as a blanket crime by police to arrest people in any situation where the police use force, especially if they use improper or excessive force. It is completely logical to me that both would drop by 60% because very often they are the same thing.
That is, often a police officer will aggress against a person for whatever reason and then later claim that the person they aggressed against was the agressor. It basically allows an officer to arrest or even beat anyone up for anything and is a much more common tactic than you think. When the citizen gets to court, do you think a judge or jury will believe the police officer or the citizen?
We hear a lot about the minority of cases where a bystander taped the scene and the police did something wrong, but you don't hear about the majority where nobody was there to video tape it.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
As a counterpoint, I've seen quite a few cases where somebody ends up being charged with 'assaulting an officer' more or less for arguing with him.
I've seen videos of it. Sure, the person is normally being a douche while running his mouth a mile a minute and is sometimes failing to take action to officer directions that require active movement like 'Turn around', 'get on your knees', etc... But does failing to produce ID count as assaulting a police officer? Threatening a lawsuit? Complaining that the stop is illegal?
These charges normally end up dropped, but my point would be that if officers think they can get away with charges like this when the interaction is being caught on their car's camera, what are they doing when they don't think they're being video taped?
Maybe, knowing that they're being recorded, the officers are actually practicing their de-escalation techniques and they're working.
I don't read AC A human right
I've come to believe that you don't so much have good or bad police officers. What you have is good or bad police DEPARTMENTS. The difference in local police culture can be tremendous.
I'll try to boil it down a bit: Basically, take a brand new cop. They run the range of idealistic and great to power tripping and corrupt. Good and Bad, but most are in the middle. Then they get to their first department. A good department will show the bad eggs the door rather quickly, provide good role models to the middle run recruits, making them good officers. A bad department will often do much the opposite - driving the idealistic good officers away(remember the intelligence test where you wouldn't be hired if you scored too high?), providing shelter(often at great expense in lawsuits!) to the bad ones, and showing the middle ground recruits bad habits and procedures that they pick up, becoming worse than when they were recruited.
This is why you can have comparable districts with OOMs worth of difference in lawsuits, corruption trials, etc... But there's a huge difference between a department with half a dozen lawsuits a year, most of which end up dropped, and a department that's paying millions of taxpayer dollars in a dozen settled wrongful death lawsuits every year. Oh, and has a case in the supreme court for possibly unconstitutional discriminatory practices.
I've seen the difference in the military with how the supervisors are.
I don't read AC A human right
I wasn't found guilty. I pleaded something similar to "no contest" because the plea bargain offer had no jail time.
Guess what, you have that on the record because "no contest" is effectively the same as pleading guilty. As a result, you may find moving to another country incredibly difficult. Heck, even Canada will demand thousands in fees and professional document creation(IE lawyers filling out forms) before they'll let you in.
Of course, I hate how our current system allows police and prosecutors to effectively punish people without ever finding them guilty of anything. Legal fees alone can ruin people.
I don't read AC A human right