Should Cops Wear Google Glass?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Over at The Kernel, staff writer Greg Stevens wonders whether police departments around the world should outfit their officers with Google Glass. There's some logic behind the idea. A cop with wearable electronics constantly streaming audio and video back to a supervisor (or even a Website) would be less likely, at least in theory, to take liberties with civilians' civil liberties. But not everybody thinks it's such a good idea. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote in a recent blog posting that society needs to make choices 'about the extent to which we want to allow the government to store up that data so that it has the power to hit 'rewind' on everybody's lives.' In the view of that organization, 'that's just too much power.' That being said, law enforcement wearing electronics that streams constant video and audio data would still be subject to the law. 'If the officer is recording a communication he has in public with someone, there's probably no wiretap problem since there's at least the consent of one party and no expectation of privacy,' Hanni M. Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an email to Slashdot. 'But if he's recording peripheral communications between two separate individuals, than there's potential wiretap liability depending on the circumstances.' What do you think? Are cops wearing Google Glass (or similar wearable electronic) a good idea?"

Comments

Just for video recording?

[timeOday]

I don't understand why so much of the focus on google glass is on the video camera. Lots of devices can record video, that's nothing new.

If police should be wearing google glass, it would be because it can provide heads up information, as opposed to the rather bulky laptop-based systems now in their cruisers.

A good idea with one condition

[russotto]

If the recording is "missing" for any reason, or if the cop stops recording or removes the recording device for any reason other than someone else breaking it (and visibly doing so), everything the cop says about the unrecorded events should be assumed to be a lie.

Re:A good idea with one condition

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. You are right. Malfunctions happen on a regular basis. The fact that they only happen when it benefits the cop, and never when it would incriminate them is pure coincidence.

Since you clearly have little experience dealing with the police, or worse yet, are one yourself, how about letting the people who actually have experience with the many, many criminals wearing badges do the analysis. Thanks.

The streams have to be restricted

[msobkow]

The streams from these "cop cameras" have to be restricted so that they can only be accessed by the officer's supervisors and with a subpoena. I strongly object to the proposals some have made that the footage be made public. I do not want my every interaction with the police made public, even if it's getting a jaywalking ticket.

"Innocent until proven guilty" can't be achieved when facing the court of public opinion.

San Francisco Fire is banning helmet cams

[tranquilidad]

The San Francisco Fire Chief just banned fire helmet mounted cameras after helmet-cam footage from the Asiana crash became public. Some say it was done to protect the privacy of victims, others to protect the city from liability as in this case where one of the victims was still alive when run over by a responding fire truck.

Who watches the watchers

[VernonNemitz]

The answer to that ancient question, because we can actually do it with today's tech, is "everyone". So all public buildings and public/government vehicles should be wired with webcams that anyone can access at any time to see what Public Servants are actually doing (instead of what they claim to be doing). Remember Heinlein's "Notebooks of Lazarus Long", and the particular quotation "Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny." Cops that can do things without being watched are in a position to abuse power just like any other tyrant.

Re:Who watches the watchers

[currently_awake]

Allowing the general public to see the video without a warrant means people can spy on you (using the government cameras) and therefore invade your privacy. If a police officer questions you about something, it would end up on the internet even if the accusation was provably false. Also it means criminals can map out where the cops go (or don't go) in order to find gaps for criminal activity.

Re:Who watches the watchers

[PopeRatzo]

How often do you actually hear about a police officer in America doing something wrong on national tv?

And from that you take away that police seldom do anything wrong?

By your logic, "Honey, I've told you I've never cheated on you, so that's proof I'm not cheating on you!"

My mother was a cop, and my uncle a us marshall your ideas of cops sneaking around and all of them doing illegal things like legalized crooks is hilariously stupid

Nobody says that "all of them" are doing illegal things. But they're supposed to be held to a much higher standard than the rest of us, because they're the ones who have power.

Here in Chicago, we went through decades where a Division Commander was running a torture regime which put scores of people in jail and on death row by torturing confessions out of them. For the decades that was happening, nobody heard about it, so by your standard, it wasn't happening.

It doesn't take a big percentage of crooked cops to put the entire system at risk. Just ask the people over at the Innocence Project, who have, as of now, gotten over 300 people off death row by using DNA evidence, about the damage police misconduct and prosecutorial overreach does. Ask one of those guys who were waiting for a lethal injection until a group of volunteers peeked under the skirts of police departments and found something very foul.

Most cops I know are a lot less sanguine than you are about police misconduct, which splashed mud on them and makes their job a lot harder. Every one of them can tell you stories of bad cops and the damage they do.

Re:Who watches the watchers

[Frobnicator]

That is exactly why they are so badly needed. Not Glass, but a continuous recording device.

Several cities started pilot programs with cop-cameras, and mine was among them buying 80 cop-cams. We had a few bad cops fired, complaints against cops almost vanished, and now the city is trying to make it mandatory for all cops on duty. They provide strong evidence both to support your innocence and to support your guilt. They also provide evidence against bad cops.

Look at the New York Times article regarding the results from one city: Complaints about abuse and civil rights violations dropped by 80%, use of force dropped by 60%.

Bonus points are that the camera footage is evidence. If they are notified to keep the footage, they MUST do it and the MUST turn it over to your defense. As this type of footage grows we can demand "pics or it didn't happen". Just like the dash cams transformed traffic tickets (rate of claimed abuse plummeted, rate of fought tickets increased because there was video evidence) the same should spread to all aspects of police work. Around here it is already transforming defense lawyer's approaches because they can get unmodified views of the crime scene from every officer's point of view. (This becasuse the recordings are evidence, and any potentially exculpatory evidence must be shared with the defendant.)

I hope it takes off. If an officer says there was anything from a 'confession' of a crime or there are claims of police abuse, if there is no cop-camera footage the judge and jury should be asking, "what is this cop trying to hide?"

Re:Who watches the watchers

[0111 1110]

There are even more cops that are provoked into taking actions they shouldn't take by taunting assholes, who somehow never show up in the news.

Don't call me an asshole. The cop swore at me first. So cops have the right to swear at regular citizens, but we do not have the right to swear back at them? Is this some kind of aristocracy class system, where cops are the only first class citizens?

But maybe if X number complaints filed against against an officer that guy gets to where the camera for a month.

Unfortunately in my state complaints against cops are kept strictly confidential. The only people who would know about them are the people who filed them and the cops themselves and the cops are not going to police themselves. That much should be pretty clear by now. Law suits are public record of course. That was one reason I wanted to sue my police attacker, but I couldn't afford the law suit and the cop probably would have finished off what he started and simply murdered me anyway. He's just that kind of guy.

But by and large, this group of cops is small by comparison to the total number of cops that follow the rules most of the time, do their jobs without trying to piss off and provoke everyone they come into contact with.

Bullshit. You have no better statistical basis to make such a claim than anyone else. Go read about the Stanford Prison Experiment and then try to say this with a straight face. Given power people turn bad. They turn mean and violent. And those are people that didn't even start that way. Most cops start that way and just grow worse when they graduate frorm school yard bully to professional thug.Your claim is more wishful thinking than anything else.

Rialto PD did a real world study.

[Above]

The Rialto PD did a real world study, with a write up in the New York Times plus a formal report by a Cambridge University Professor.

The results were overwhelming positive. Use of unnecessary force on citizens dropped. Bogus complaints against officers dropped. Time spent dealing with he-said she-said situations dropped.

Big cities should be jumping on this technology. In 2012 New York City spent 735 Million Dollars on settlements. I suspect cameras would dramatically reduce that number, both from officers being forced to be more careful but also from bogus citizen complaints being quickly dismissed with video proof.

Is Google Glass the right answer, no. It does way more than just video, and has cost and durability concerns. However personal video cameras are the answer, every cop (and probably firefighter and paramedic) should wear one.

Re:Federal Cop Experience

[PopeRatzo]

but for every dirty cop, there are at least a thousand who are trying to make their neighborhood better.

And those thousand want the dirty ones gone, I bet.

I have a very high opinion of police. The level of professionalism has gone up so much in the past 40 years (at least in Northern cities) that it's like a completely different animal. Used to be, the guy from the people you hung out with who became a cop was the last guy you'd want with any authority. Now, the young people going into the academy are first-rate. I deal with them every day, living two blocks from the Chicago Police Academy. Maybe my perspective has changed, now that I have a family and property, but I know for sure they've changed. For the better.

The civilians who are giving the orders? Not so much. They seem more entranced by paramilitary hardware and tactics than by community policing, which is a damn shame.