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Obama Offers Funding For 50,000 Police Body Cameras
An anonymous reader writes: Today President Obama announced $263 million worth of funding for law enforcement agencies around the country to outfit officers with body cameras and improve training. The money requires matching funds from state and local authorities, and the $75 million dedicated to body-cams should buy about 50,000 of them. This is in response to the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. "Obama also plans to overhaul how the federal government disperses military equipment to local police departments, the White House said Monday. ... The Ferguson police department deployed officers wearing gas masks, military fatigues, stun guns and rubber bullets during the initial protests. Studies show the procurement of military equipment by police departments has been on the rise as law enforcement has been allowed to cheaply purchase gear originally deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Up here in Washington State, several police agencies have embraced the idea of Body Cams. And while there has been no philosophical push-back about public access to Body Cam footage by the coppers, a recent Public Records Request illustrates a more fiscal problem...
A public records request was made for all Body Cam footage for the last year from several local departments that have been experimenting with the technology. Why should this be a probem, after all, just burn it all to a CD and send it to the guy?
The are three issues: Privacy - not every interaction a police officer has is in a public place or does not contain things than fall under privacy rules.
Second is commercial use - You know those Mug Shot Extortion sites? The ones that publish mug shots but for a small fee of several hundred dollars will take yours down? Same thing.
Third is the fiscal issue - The time to parse through a requst for "all your files for the year" for privacy issues and other things that simply should not end up on a commercial "shock" site or YouTube, this will cost a butt-load.
So it's become an issue. Here is a Seattle Times article on the subject: http://seattletimes.com/html/l...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
it just seems another step to pervasive surveillance.
Currently they videotape you whenever they want to. Every officer already has the means to tape you if they so choose. The current situation is that they only do record and keep the video when it suits their needs, and they delete it when it's bad for them. The only change here will be the requirement to always record and retain that data.
For example, were you aware they always record interrogations? (see the video in my sig) but only for their own review to be use against you in court. After they finish the interrogation they intentionally delete it so you can't use it in your defense. They've proven that a jury will more likely believe a police officer stating that you confessed than a video of you actually confessing! So they destroy the audio/video!
Any and all testimony you make against yourself should be required by law to be taped. There is absolutely no excuse for the current state of things where law enforcements word is trusted implicitly when current technology makes it completely unnecessary to do so. Every statement a person makes to law enforcement could be recorded, virtually for free, and there would then be no need for their testimony at all.
Police also need to respect citizens. Being on camera all the time will help that at lot. Everyone behaves better when they're on camera.
Example from the article:
True, but most states have a law similar to FOIA. Oregon has Oregon Open Records Act, which is similar to FOIA. The Oregon Open Records Act applies to the State of Oregon, all municipalities, and all county governments, so pretty much all cops are covered in Oregon.
If the shooting in Ferguson was captured on video there would have been no protests. If the video showed a harmless man being gunned down in cold blood then the cop would be on trial for murder and the public would see justice being served - there would certainly be complaints but nothing like what we saw.
Unfortunately, that's not what happened in this case with the Bart police.
The police officer only got nine months of prison, and even then, that's only because of the protests and the riots that followed. Initially, they didn't have any intention of pressing charges.
No wonder, the Bart police is just looking for ways to quickly shut down the cell phone service. Had they had this ability to shut down the cell phone networks during the initial incident, they would have at least had the time to confiscate everyone's cell phone before the video could have been uploaded anywhere.
ferguson isnt about one incident.
its about a track record of bad behaviour on the part of their local PD.
of abusive and discriminatory police actions.
indeed, in this case it appears that the officer have been justified*, and therefore the protestors shouldnt focus so much on this particular incident but rather more on that history, on that pattern of behaviour.
but then again, these are folks so disillusioned with their local police, so cut off from their local government, that they no longer trust anything the local authorities tell them.
rightly or wrongly, they view the findings in the brown/wilson case are simply more of the same. if it was a different colored group of people distrusting the government and protesting a track record of government abuse (existent or not), like say some rancher somewhere, there would be less condemnation and more support. people would even drive clear across the country in that support.
and looking at how the police handled this case, from the very begining, it really is more of the same:
-body was left in the street for hours...no ambulence came, no nothing
-police abused protestors, both physically and verbally, with racial epithets thrown
-police roughed up journalists
-police violated civil rights of protestors
-police kept out news helicopters trying to cover story (didnt want aerial footage like the infamous footage from Selma)
-SWAT and sniper teams with weapons aimed at protestors
-tear gas used against protestors (held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court years ago)
Basically everything they could do wrong in handling the entire situation, they did.
In fact it even seemed like they were purposely antagonistic to the protestors.