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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.
Just wait, til the cops start uploading all their footage to a central server for the NSA to add to its collection so they can start cataloging every social interaction that cops see while on their beat. Someone who's face matches a potential subject of interest in a database will get flagged when they show up on the footage and the NSA will then start tracking them based on geolocation data in the footage.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
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.
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".
But the footage can be lost and blamed on an "off" camera.
That is exactly what the ACLU objected to.
The proposed bill mandated that police carried them, but left optional what is recorded, did not require access by citizens, and did not specify a data retention policy. The ACLU objection (see the actual story) cited cases where police turned off the cameras during the (alleged) abuses, sometimes multiple cops turning off each others cameras, and where judges ruled in favor of the cops when the evidence was missing. Data could also be deleted the same day for no reason other than a personal judgement call.
The bill was a good start, but needs mandatory recording requirements, mandatory citizen access, and mandatory data retention policies.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
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