Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look at the history of dash cams. They always 'fail' or tapes are lost when the footage is bad for the cops.
Until the track record changes it is safe to assume the video will never show the cops applying some 'stick time'. Cops will simply have their hats fall off/shirt pocket flap fall over the camera etc.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How much do they like being monitored? Do you know, or are you just guessing based on a few sensational news stories?
I don't know of any studies on the matter, so yes it's based on anecdotes. There have been a lot of what you call "sensational news stories" about police "objecting" to being photographed or video recorded, where "objecting" can anything from falsely yelling that it's illegal (in fact it's expressly protected) to illegally grabbing the camera to finding some excuse to arrest the person (which means their equipment is confiscated and erased, if not damaged). Mysteriously the charges are usually dismissed, which often means there were no grounds for them in the first place.
I even witnessed one such event as a teenager where my friend started photographing someone getting arrested (in the park, not at some demonstration) and was told in no uncertain terms to get lost or risk being arrested.
I also worked on an early vehicle locating system, that would report back to base station where a vehicle was. This was a long time ago when such an idea was novel. Pilot systems were installed in ambulances in one city and patrol cars in another. The ambulance drivers never had any problem with it. Units were returned from patrol cars with anything from wires ripped out to, in one case, a shotgun blast though it.
It could be completely opposite of what you think, as this guy [slashdot.org] suggests with his anecdote.
He wrote:
A lot of our officers just recently got uniform-mounted cameras and the footage always shows that the complaints are completely unfounded.
First, how do I know he isn't talking about selective monitoring (use it when police are innocent, don't turn it on or "lose" it when they're not)? That's the biggest issue on this thread. Second, he wrote "always shows that the complaints are completely unfounded". Always?
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.
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
Any cop who covers for bad cops is a bad cop. Done and done.
Did you read my post beyond the first sentence? Bad cops cover for bad cops, making for whole bad departments. Good cops don't, quickly weeding out bad cops, and ensuring 'middling' cops are corrected whenever they stray even a little, keeping them on the straight and narrow.
You have a bad department it's a royal pain to clean up. You have to fire huge gobs of corrupt/bad officers, retrain the ones you can salvage, etc...
The bad department theory helps explain why some departments have so many more problems than others, why so many cops don't see problems - because there aren't problems in their view. The bad cops all run together, and often know 'which' cops they can and cannot act up around.
I don't read AC A human right