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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."
Why is this a federal charge? While I firmly believe all cops should wear cameras, I also firmly believe individual departments should be paying for them.
1. the footage shouldn't be public. there's a lot of interaction that cops deal with which is embarrassing and private for individuals. your underage arrest has to live with you forever? your suicide attempt or domestic issues should be open to prying eyes? no, no, no
2. the footage shouldn't be under the control of local police departments. "oops, sorry, i 'bumped the server' and we lost the footage of that controversial shooting by my buddy nate. oh well"
state level? federal level?
and then really solid rules about who gets to access what footage must be enacted. something similar to HIPAA rules and fines
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Mod parent up.
Washington State has a very good public records law; but this is sometimes a problem. The press should be able to get police body cam feeds, probably, and certainly on matters of public concern but realistically it causes more harm than good to have all police bodycam feeds publicly available through, for example, data-mining firms.
Should the time cops broke up that party a kid was at be available, in video, for the rest of the kid's life?
How about the time the couple at the end of the block fought and a noise complaint got called in? Should future employers be able to get access to recordings of people at the worst moments of their lives?
Pervasive surveillance by law enforcement is a bad thing. Pervasive surveillance of law enforcement is a good thing. And that is what these body cams are: They aren't recording anything that police officers aren't already seeing with their own eyes. Instead, these cameras create a record of officers' actions -- a record that keeps them accountable for said actions.
it just seems another step to pervasive surveillance.
Unfortunately, there are good reasons for wanting police interaction with the public to be recorded - Rampant police misconduct, and I'm not talking about Furgeson.
Here is Seattle, our police department is under supervision by the D.O.J. mandated by the Federal Courts after numerous verified "use of force" issues.
When there is not video, who do you think juries and courts believe?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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...
The request for the footage was made by the police officers union or people working as their proxy in an attempt to prevent the cameras from getting implemented elsewhere.
How would the police handle a request for all of their Dashcam footage? Radio traffic? etc? You could make similar silly requests for all sorts of things and I'm sure they've managed to deal with those types of requests without incident as well. Don't let yourself get played.
Individual hardware is the cheap part--although it does also need to be pretty goddamn ruggedized.
Departments need new infrastructure: Servers, docking stations, stuff like that. No it's not as easy as plug it in with USB and drag and drop your files--you want this to be a lot more secure than a mountable media drive. Infrastructure is an ongoing cost too, especially with public record requests.
Training isn't zero, either. Not only do you have to teach people how to operate them (and these aren't all technical people, which means that either training is nontrivial or that docking station really is fancy and expensive), but you also need to teach them policy, really drill it in there. Call it four hours of education and training per user, and the number of users is pretty close to the number of cameras. It's paid training time, so you're covering their salary, management, the organization per-department of those training sessions, hell probably research to make sure you're giving effective training... Look, training and meetings suck, but doing them _right_ is important and it's _expensive_, and you get what you pay for.
The cost sounds realistic to me.
"Stop resisting" is too often the codeword for "we will beat the shit out of you regardless of what you do".
That said, I think both sides will be on better behavior if they know the encounter is being recorded...
society functions on trust. you can't have civil society with people who are anonymous. you need to see their emotions and their intent. even wearing sunglasses is evasive and makes you seem untrustworthy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we already have it in the form of everyone with a cell phone camera. if anything remotely interesting in public happens, 5 or 6 people are filming it and its uploaded within the hour and mirrored forever beyond any possible take back within a few hours
To bad that didn't happen in Ferguson, huh?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The request for the footage was made by the police officers union or people working as their proxy in an attempt to prevent the cameras from getting implemented elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but this is complete bullshit. The request was made by a private citizen that after the fact gave a number of interviews that indecated he was against the cams as a private citizen.
Where are your references that support your bullshit?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Will that quarter-billion dollars come from?
As a question, why is this a federal problem?
Ken
Where do you think the federal government gets it's money? From local taxpayers.
I agree this is a local, not federal, problem - I find it hard to believe that every Barney Fife across the country needs to wear a body camera because one cop in Ferguson killed someone that was attacking him.
Ken
Meh, effectively the same. Which would you rather see, a picture of the officer shooting his gun at somebody, or a picture of what the guy who got shot was doing right before he got shot? If we had the latter in Ferguson there would probably be a lot less looting going on regardless of what the footage showed.
It just makes sense to record these interactions. It protects everybody who is in the right, and deters people from being in the wrong. It gets rid of the whole he-said/she-said nonsense and restores public confidence in policing.
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. If the video showed a credible threat against the officer's or the public's safety with a measured response, then that would take the wind out of the sails of most of the protests. In the absence of conclusive evidence either way everybody gets to invent their own story of what happened.
I find it hard to believe that every Barney Fife across the country needs to wear a body camera because one cop in Ferguson killed someone that was attacking him.
Preventing another Ferguson is the catalyst, but certainly not the only reason for copcams. The cameras provide accountability. They reduce violence, since both the cop and the perp will behave better on camera. BIG ONE: They dramatically reduce lawsuits against the police. Partly because there are fewer incidents, but also because there is less dispute about what happened. They also make prosecutions faster and less expensive, since there is no dispute about what was seen or heard by the cop.
Citations:
California police body cams cut violence
Year long study on the effect of Copcams
Every cop car should have a dashcam.
Every patrolling cop should have a bodycam.
"Server bumping" could be solved by he same mechanism as "camera malfunctions", though implementation would admittedly be a problem: have the police face a presumption of guilt for all accusations that aren't on film.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Considering how many witnesses were caught telling multiple, incompatible versions of their story for the grand jury, part of me wonders if someone actually did have a video but kept quiet.
have the police face a presumption of guilt for all accusations that aren't on film.
"On duty, on video."
"All" that needs to be done is to remove qualified immunity when the camera turns off. Expect thousands of police union lawyers at that hearing - sometimes obvious solutions are impossible if the system isn't optimizing for solutions.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I don't believe that 75% comment for a second. There is currently an argument between the police union and the police commissioner with the union pushing for 100% cameras and the police commissioner pushing back saying there are significant unresolved privacy issues about wearing cameras all the time. As it stands there are cameras in most of the larger stations but they are generally used by the fortitude valley and brisbane city branches.
As for the coppers buying their own camera I don't see it. I don't see it on the police walking around and I don't get it from friends and family that are in the force.
Source - My father was a general duties police officer of 35 years till he retired in July. My brother in law is currently in comms working through police training.
As for police bias for or against in the courts - police shootings are actually rare in Australia. Even drawing your firearm results in an internal investigation. The same goes for discharging a taser. This sounds like standard procedure to get all the information. The stuff I read about in the states and places like Fergusen are almost unbelievable from my experiences here.
Considering how many witnesses were caught telling multiple, incompatible versions of their story for the grand jury, part of me wonders if someone actually did have a video but kept quiet.
They didn't need a video. They had abundant physical evidence that debunked the obvious BS that a bunch of the Get Me On The TV types were trying to sell. And then there's the number of witnesses who finally admitted they hadn't seen anything at all, and just told what they assumed (hoped?) had happened, or heard from somebody else.
There were a core of witnesses who said very similar things, and whose observations were right in line with the physical evidence. It's very telling that most of those witnesses wanted to be sure that their reports would be kept private, and out of the media. Gee, I wonder who they're scared of? Not the police - they went TO the police.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why not fund cameras using the money they stole via civil forfeiture?