Slashdot Mirror
Cameras On Cops: Coming To a Town Near You
An anonymous reader writes "The trend of police officers using body-mounted cameras is going nationwide. As we discussed last month, the NYPD is pondering the cameras, and the LAPD is actively testing them. A town in California (population ~100,000) has tested them with seeming success: incidents involving officers using force have dropped more than half, and citizen complaints have dropped almost 90%. '[C]ops are required to turn on their cameras in any confrontation with a suspect or citizen. The footage is uploaded to computers when they return to the station, and is typically retained for one to three months.' The town's success is even drawing interest from police departments in other countries. The ACLU likes the idea, but has problems with it in practice, so they're opposing the trend (PDF). They worry about privacy abuses, and they want citizens caught on camera to be allowed equal access to the footage."
Fact is as long as they can turn the cameras on or off and the video is in police custody this will do almost nothing to reduce police abuse. Either the camera will be off, the video will be "lost" or the recording device will be "broken". They want the video for convictions, but they will make damn sure the video is lost or the camera is off when they go to beat the shit out of some innocent person.
They should be required to wear camera, the cameras should record while they are on shift and video should be stored by an independent third party. Any missing footage should result in someone being fired.
Look, there are always going to be abuses of ANY system, but anything that helps raise the bar of accountability is inherently a Good Thing(TM) so please stop the whining about how it's not totally perfect.
Run around and point a video cam at a cop.
Or ... better don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This! Every system can be defeated, but each new system that has to be defeated is good. Plus, for anything serious more than one cop will be there, and stories about "accidental damage to devices" become even less likely to fly when it coincidentally affects all 6 officers who responded to the same incident, and no one else that day.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So, when cops have cameras, reported incidents of police using force dropped by half. I believe that means that 50% of uses of force were unwarranted or unnecessary, otherwise why would they have stopped?
This sound like pretty clear evidence that police think they can get away with bending the law as long as no one (except the victim) sees them.
Also most incidents of bad behavior start off with police officers who walk in ambiguous situations with the initial intention to behave professionally (e.g. the officers who beat up Rodney King were not intending to lose control of their emotions and the situation when the encounter started). Those police officers will not turn off their cameras.
Everyone knows that cops have had video cameras mounted in their cars, for decades. Neat how you skipped the parts of the summary talking about how police violence and complaints have dropped dramatically where these cameras have been used.
Almost like it's the cops who are the real jerks here. Interesting.
The problem with the "aww, it's just a few bad apples" canard is that one bad one rots the whole barrel. When all your "good cops" are willing to commit perjury to cover up for the "bad apples", there are no good cops.
I suspect you should have a good chat with Kelly Thomas and revise your storyline. Or read up on LEO departments stealing millions from people not convicted of any crime via "asset forfeiture". Or how hundreds of thousands of mostly black and brown men are stopped in NYC without probable suspicion under "stop and frisk".
You may want to look up the word "unjustifiable".
The shooting may have been stupid and tragic, but it's pretty easily justified. Watching the video, the man gets out of his truck without being asked to, ignores the officer calling to him, then pulls a long thin object out of a holder in the back of the cab, which he immediately swings toward the officer. The officer, upon seeing what looks like a small rifle or shotgun aimed at him, shoots the apparently-armed man. The officer didn't realize it was a cane, and the man didn't think it'd look like a gun.
It was pretty obviously a mistake. What's right now is not to whine about "police abuse", but rather to heal the man (who survived and is reportedly doing well), understand that Hanlon's Razor is still valid, and move on.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Let's put this in a different light to show you why the ACLU took this position. You are a programmer writing the ruleset to be used to prioritize some set of functions in your project. Once you are finished, you send your ruleset (a bill to be voted on) to committee for peer review and feed back. Maybe call it the "beta" version of your ruleset.
The ACLU(quality control staff) is basically telling the lawmakers(you, the grunt programmer) that while this bill(ruleset) they want to pass has the general idea, there are a number of glaring holes that will be exploited to cause predictable and unpredictable outcomes. Instead of just passing your swiss cheese ruleset along to later be patched up, the ACLU is saying to send it back to be done correctly.
So really, they are trying to help implement a good idea in a positive fashion, as opposed to letting people take a good idea and muck it up with potential failure.
Also most incidents of bad behavior start off with police officers who walk in ambiguous situations with the initial intention to behave professionally (e.g. the officers who beat up Rodney King were not intending to lose control of their emotions and the situation when the encounter started). Those police officers will not turn off their cameras.
Is "most" your guess, or do you actually have any evidence? (Although, I suppose it depends what you mean by "behave professionally"...)
I used to think that the ACLU was a force for good, and they might be. But they do not know when to quit, or compromise on anything. Here we are finally getting accountability for law enforcement, and now they want to stop the program?
Obviously you didn't RTFA.
The ACLU complaint was that while the law requires LEOs to carry the cameras, it does not mandate that they actually record anything, it does not mandate that the recordings be made available to the citizens who were arrested, interviewed, or interacted with, and it doesn't specify a data retention policy.
The ACLU agreed that cameras are good. They want mandatory recordings rather than optional recordings. They want the complete, unedited recording to be available to the citizens involved. And they want a data retention policy so officers cannot delete the material the same day, nor can they keep it indefinitely.
The ACLU's 2-page comment (see the article) cited specific cases where these were problems. One had multiple officers turn cameras off when a citizen didn't cooperate, then they turned the cameras back on to reveal a citizen who was badly injured, with the official report being they had injured themselves while resisting arrest. Also it cites accounts where officers clearly edited footage by removing potentially incriminating bits, and of officers deleting the recordings the same day rather than filing them as part of the reports of their associated incidents.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement