Watching the Police: Will Two-Way Surveillance Reduce Crime?

An anonymous reader writes "As surveillance technologies have matured in both their sophistication and usage, some are starting to ask the question: is it time we start using them to watch the watchers? The proliferation of dashboard cameras has reduced liability costs, provided valuable evidence, and made police officers safer. The next progression would naturally be for the camera to move out of the car and onto the officer's uniform itself. In The Verge appears a fascinating report about the company behind the non-lethal stun guns that have become commonplace around the world, Taser International, which has set out to transform policing once again – this time, with Axon Flex, a head-mounted camera with a twelve-hour battery life that officers can use to record interactions. The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen. Footage is then uploaded to a cloud-based service where it can be accessed by the police department. It includes an audit trail to reveal who has accessed the information and when."

Comments

The ONLY Way this should work is...

[SirGeek]

if 100% of the footage is uploaded/published on a regular basis.

Remove the ability of a department to "lose" the info. Perhaps even send the raw footage to the AFL-CIO

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[CanHasDIY]

if 100% of the footage is uploaded/published on a regular basis.

Remove the ability of a department to "lose" the info. Perhaps even send the raw footage to the AFL-CIO

Also, change

Footage is then uploaded to a cloud-based service where it can be accessed by the police department

to

Footage is then uploaded to a cloud-based service where it can be accessed by the public

It seems apparent that Internal Affairs, AKA the "Office of Paid Vacations," is a fucking joke in most municipalities.

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[Trepidity]

Perhaps even send the raw footage to the AFL-CIO

Nitpick, but I assume you mean the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), not the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)...

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[fredprado]

Always. The only assured counter to violence is violence.

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[Synerg1y]

Let's think about this for a second, lets say you were falsely arrested for rape, it happens EVERY day thanks to a certain breed of woman, would you really want that footage to immediately be uploaded for the public's viewing? Probably not.

The police department isn't the right department to regulate the police department either, they've had enough chances. We'd need yet another government regulatory agency for this to work. It'd also make being a cop even tougher, so its a shame a few bad apples have to spoil the bunch, but we don't live in medieval times anymore either where it's acceptable to get away with vagrant abuses of power.

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[Crudely_Indecent]

I hate it when vagrants abuse their power. They do it in such a flagrant way.

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[CanHasDIY]

Let's think about this for a second, lets say you were falsely arrested for rape, it happens EVERY day thanks to a certain breed of woman, would you really want that footage to immediately be uploaded for the public's viewing?

The tape would probably consist of me laughing about the accusation, then politely asking the officer what the result from the rape kit were.

Oh, you say no rape kit was administered? So, then, what am I being arrested for?

Yea, don't see where that would be an issue for me (since I'm not a rapist and all).

The police department isn't the right department to regulate the police department either, they've had enough chances. We'd need yet another government regulatory agency for this to work.

... and what would you call the regulatory body? The "We May Have Fucked This Up Before, But Trust Us When We Say We Won't Fuck It Up This Time" Department? Helluva acronym...

It'd also make being a cop even tougher, so its a shame a few bad apples have to spoil the bunch

Yea, always hear that - only a few cops are dirty, and give the rest a bad name. To that, I say - Bull-fucking-shit; if a 'good' cop sees a bad cop doing bad things and breaking the law, and doesn't immediately arrest the other officer, then the 'good' cop is just as fucked, just as wrong as the cop breaking the law. Period, end of story. It's like if you stopped at a gas station with a friend, who proceeded to get out of your car, walk in the station, steal the money from the till, and get back in your car. According to the law, YOU are just as guilty as your 'friend' for aiding and abetting his crime; why should cops, who are supposed to uphold the law, be treated any differently?

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Appeasement isn't a very sound foreign policy either, Prime Minister Chamberlain...

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[dkleinsc]

Or strategically moving to a location where the camera can't see. For example, look up the dashboard footage of the shooting of John T Williams in Seattle: SPD officer Ian Burke sees Williams committing the heinous crime of walking across a street, yells at him to stop, leaves the camera frame, and then shoots Williams 4 times in the back and side. In the ensuing investigation, Burke successfully claimed self defense and avoided all criminal responsibility, even though he was the only person at the scene who did anything remotely violent. This even though the eyewitnesses (including one that courageously confronted Burke immediately) said that Williams presented no danger to them or to Burke.

Re:The ONLY Way this should work is...

[Genda]

Time and time again its been shown that the very act of policing changes human behavior, the impact it has on human psychology is profound and predictable. People who are responsible for "controlling", "managing" or "policing" groups of people that have been psychologically "Othered", tend to use unacceptable force, show dramatic loss of sympathy, empathy and compassion, and in general commit the kind nasty primate behavior we all have taboos against doing in normal polite society.

The requirement is to first weed sociopaths and psychopaths out of police work, not doing that is a recipe for disaster. Next police education should include STRONG training in human behavior with a healthy shot of brain science and an appreciation for how the human brain (and its impact on the human mind) is impacted by a steady diet of "Keeping the Bad Guys at bay." There should be regular counseling, absolutely should be recorded police behavior, if nothing else to get a better handle on keeping our police mentally healthy and operationally effective. By the way, the police don't happen in a vacuum. The same ultra moralistic, hyper vigilant, religious rite (spelling intended) American subcultures that have put express lanes on their death rows and don't even blink twice at the fact that they've done a piss pour job of sorting the innocent from the guilty (the common heard refrain is let Gawd sort them out), leads to police that shoot first and worry about your human rights maybe later? I'm not saying that a New York officer who decides to break a broom handle off in some poor innocent Haitian's rectum isn't an atrocity deserving of some version of human life sacrifice. I am saying that there seem to be entire regions of the U.S. where public attitudes point to seriously questionable ethics and commonly result in atrocious behavior as common course, particularly by authorities.

Others have mentioned public Ombudsman Programs, awesome ideas. Recording people's behavior to enhance accountability, equally awesome. Holding society at large to greater responsibility, makes me tear up with happiness. We get the services we manage, and take accountability for. No accountability, no service (or worse, disservice.) Most of all, we train people to be great. We explain that correction isn't being judged as wrong, its the control process required to get anything from point A to point B (its simply steering.) Treat the police great, their work is difficult, dangerous and seldom appreciated. Manage their humanity, the good, the bad and the ugly. Take care of them, so they can take care of us. By the way, while you're getting the police perfect, you also want to start working on the political system, education, public sector employees, the legal justice system and doctors.

We've pretty much proven self regulation is virtually no regulation at all. I welcome the day we have an IBM Watson for the general administration of large professional/government bodies. By all means leave the disposition of people to people, but put a computer in the mix looking out for misconduct and dirty deeds done cheap . Adding that and systemic transparency suggests a golden age of rational human services right around the corner! And yes, expect foot dragging, nobody willing relinquishes control.

Just say'in

[Anonymous Coward]

The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen.

But not when beating the citizen? Or violating his rights?

Crime isn't what concerns me

[sl4shd0rk]

The imbalance of power does. Giving the cops a headcam should be enough reason not to have to confiscate everyone's phone now.

Re:Crime isn't what concerns me

[Hizonner]

The proposed devices record constantly, but they throw away the video after 30 seconds unless the officer triggers them to keep it. That's not "recording at all times"; it's "recording when the officer chooses to record".

The police have the same incentives as the public for selective recording. They also "aren't recording for the sake of having a complete and accurate record of events". They're recording to have something to justify their actions and preserve their jobs. They're not going to record if their actions aren't in fact justified, at least not except by mistake.

If they're recording selectively, then there'd better be others recording to take up the slack. If both "sides" have the ability to record, then you have a chance that at least one recording will get out when there's a matter of public interest. One might hope that both recordings would get out.

The alternative would be continuous recording even when neither side thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.

Re:Crime isn't what concerns me

[Chuckstar]

But what if I don't want my interaction with a police officer recorded? What if I'm telling him about the drug dealer down the street and would rather that guy not find out who was talking to the cops? Or maybe a cop regularly comes in and shoots-the-shit with me in my retail business. All of that would be recorded? It's good for cops to have that kind of casual relationship with people along their beat. It's not good that those people would be concerned that everything they said to the cop gets recorded

I'm absolutely a general proponent of the idea of recording police at work. It works great for car-mounted situations, because it's rare that dash cams would record the kind of citizen interactions I'd be worried about having recorded. But unless there is some way to mitigate my concerns, I believe recording day-to-day officer interactions would do more harm than good.

Ubiquitous surveillance

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubiquitous surveillance of everyone by everyone is inevitable. Dashcams and google glass are merely the first. Cams will become smaller, batteries will become smaller, internet will become faster, and everyone will automatically store what they see in their cloud of preference.

Finally witness statements, which are proven to be unreliable, can be backed up by actual evidence.

Hurrah for progress.

It was predicted 20 years ago

[mcrbids]

Strangely, the scenarios presented were placed 20 years in the future. Posted in 1993, then-revolutionary Wired Magazine got it exactly, dead on. It's almost strange how they were so dead-on as far as the time scale.

Notice all the dash cam footage coming out of the Soviet Union...

Re:It was predicted 20 years ago

[Minwee]

Strangely, the scenarios presented were placed 20 years in the future. Posted in 1993, then-revolutionary Wired Magazine got it exactly, dead on.

Actually, in 1990 then-science-fiction-author and some-time Wired Magazine contributor David Brin got it exactly, dead on. He just kept on writing about it for several years after that.

Public Video needs to be publicly-accessible.

[eriks]

I've said this for years. I have no problem with all the public-facing cameras, so long as the output from all those cameras is available to the public, preferably directly, in realtime. The cameras then become a public asset. Law enforcement can use them, but so can the rest of us. There's already no expectation of privacy in public places, so I don't see any issues with universal access to the data.

I'd guess it might be necessary to restrict access to police dashcams and "uniform-cams" for a time, but eventually it should all be made public, with review processes in place to make sure that none of it gets "accidentally" deleted.

Taser International is the wrong group to do this

[Mr. Slippery]

Any group surveiling the cops shouldn't be selling those cops stuff. "Hey, the XYZ PD just ordered another $500k of merch from us, I think we can 'lose' that embarrassing video."

Taser International is a bunch of evil fuckwads who've made their bankrolls selling lethal electrical torture devices to police. Their irresponsible marketing has lead to an increase in the use of excessive force by cops. My trust in them is zero.

Re:Taser International is the wrong group to do th

[Bacon Bits]

It's not about the armed violent suspects. It's the unarmed violent suspects, or unarmed not-particularly-violent suspects, or even the armed, non-violent suspects. Tasers aren't used just as an alternative to lethal force, they're used as an alternative to other forms of less-lethal force.

Think about it. You're a little kid. You have just a metal bat. How likely are you to randomly hit someone with it? Not very, right? I mean, it would hurt, and there would be repercussions to hurting someone. Now we'll give you a foam bad. How likely are you to randomly hit someone with it? If you're anything like my nephew, you're going to smack everybody with it as soon as they get into range because, hey, foam bats don't hurt that much, right? Now how about a hard plastic wiffle bat? You're not going to kill someone with it, but you can sure as hell cause some pain by doing it. Swing that around a few times, and you're going to actually hurt people. Not broken bone pain, but you'll raise some welts. You're not going to cause the kind of damage a metal bat would, but you're going to use it a lot more often than you really should.

This is the problem with tasers. They make the Police think they should use them when we as citizens think they shouldn't be using a weapon at all.