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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.
This is going to ensure police are held accountable but the root of the problem is the lack of respect people have for people of authority. Once suspects listen to police (e.g. stop running, don't resist, etc.) we'll have less problems.
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.
time to buy some gopro stock?
Wyoming, maybe. there's lots of 'em.
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?
Fortunately, you don't have the sense God gave a piss ant to find your way to a voting booth.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
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
From a news report of ITWire from the 17th of September this year.
Privacy, resourcing hurdles for Brisbane 'robocops'.
Queensland Police’s chief commissioner remains unconvinced about the benefits of cameras pinned to the chests of police officers, despite his southern counterparts pledging $4 million to the technology.
Qld chief commissioner Ian Stewart yesterday told Fairfax radio he still wasn’t fully satisfied that privacy, resourcing and value-for-money issues had been ironed out to the extent that the QPS could proceed with a full rollout of body-worn cameras, beyond limited use of the devices planned for the G20 summit in November.
“It is not quite as simple as putting a camera on a body,” he said, describing privacy as one of the biggest hurdles still to be overcome.
“There are issues such as police walking into a domestic violence situation, where children are involved[or] having the camera on when they are dealing with a sexual offence,” he said.
He also raised doubts about whether the debt-laden state government could afford such an enterprise.
“There is a huge cost behind this. That is about the storage of the information and it is about the classification of the information and the amount of time that the officers are going to have to spend at the end of a shift downloading it and putting into secure storage."
“We are talking about a significant impact on time out on the road,” he said.
Stewart, who has overseen the Queensland Police’s pioneering iPad scheme did, however, concede that the era of “the robocop” was on its way.
“Ultimately I think it is coming, butit still comes down to the human being behind that camera and them doing their job professionally.”
Stewart’s southern counterparts in the NSW Police force have already signed off on the purchase of body-worn cameras for officers, but NSW Police Minister Stuart Ayres declined to comment on the concerns raised by Stewart.
Police unions in both states have vocally backed the technology.
Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers told the Courier Mail in July the cameras should be thought of as “the modern equivalent of the police notebook”.
The Police Association of NSW said “it has been shown the presence of this type of video can often defuse potentially violent situations without the need for force to be used”.
Read more: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
Also here is a link to a photo of the Aus police ones - they look pretty well reinforced.
http://resources2.news.com.au/...
Will that quarter-billion dollars come from?
As a question, why is this a federal problem?
Ken
For the most relevant example to this funding, go read the detailed incident reports Darren Wilson wrote about the Michael Brown incident, or the mandated ones from the Ferguson PD. Oh wait, you can't, since they contain little more than time and date and statement that there was a shooting, and were done too long after the incident. With an event like this, where the documentation is all but nonexistent - for whatever reason - cameras provide a more-reliable narrative. Wish it weren't so, but it is.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
FOIA also allows agencies to charge reasonable charges for documents they produce
FOIA only applies to the Federal government, not local and state government.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Individual hardware is the cheap part--although it does also need to be pretty goddamn ruggedized."
"goddamn" ruggerized? Why? I understand they can't be too cheap that they break every week but I don't see why they should be much more ruggerized than the cop's shirt.
"Departments need new infrastructure: Servers, docking stations, stuff like that."
Yes, that's true.
"It's not as easy as plug it in with USB and drag and drop your files"
Why not? In fact, it should be that easy or you risk too high failure rates -and if that's the case, the whole program gets bastardized since it would be just too easy to claim "something went wrong, that's why I can produce the footage of that nasty shotting."
You just need strong on-chip encription tied to the cop's camera and then everything else should be drag-n-drop.
"you also need to teach them policy, really drill it in there. Call it four hours"
Wrong again. Here goes all instruction cops need:
This camera is to be attached to this pin (pointing to a pin on a tab on the shirt). It has to be attached at all times when on service. Press the Big-Red-Button once and the camera is working. Press the Big-Green-Button once and the camera is not working. The camera should always be working from the moment you go out the police station to the moment you come back in except when you are in the WC. Failing to follow this rule will result in immediate termination.
End of instruction.
"if it is SAVED, and something "goes to trial" or something the news media will chop, splice it to fit their agenda, as well as the police, for their agenda."
Make such a behaviour illegal and support the law with technical means (checksuming the footage).
They foresaw the extensive used of rubber bullets forty years ago.
The Circle: Meanwhile, the Circle continues to develop a range of sophisticated technologies, including SeeChange, light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal efforts. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times.
Cops are trained to hit center of mass. Most handgun fights are within 10 feet and over within seconds. You don't have time to overthink "Should I wound him or kill him?"
If you tried for a wounding shot like the legs or arms, you'd likely miss. And even if you shot to wound and hit their legs, who's saying you wouldn't hit the femoral artery and have them bleed out faster than an ambulance could get there?
The rest is just tl;dr. The cops collectively are out of control with their authoritarianism, civil forfeiture and paramilitary fetishism but I feel some sympathy for most of them individually because it's an impossible job to begin with and made worse when every action is put under a PC microscope and second guessed by people who have never even done a ride along let alone done the job.
And the black community has to quit with both the victimhood and the total denial of the road warrior lifestyle in "the community". Racism can't explain bulk importing Mexicans by the millions to do jobs blacks won't do. Tell me why racists won't hire a black guy to roof houses or work in a kitchen but they will hire Mexicans who are at best marginally literate in Spanish and most likely completely illiterate in English.
Record everything you do, and only save the exculpatory footage*.
*footage - we all know what that means, right? Like "dialing" a phone...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They missed your script proposal. They were too amazed at how you shot the pen out of their fingers.
Sorry, I can't get past the concept "of shoot to wound" or "Let the assailant get closer to you" fallacies. What the hell is "toughed up" even supposed to mean? Get into a physical confrontation and possibly get your weapon taken away, etc? And if it was a female cop should she have "toughed up"?
You aim for the biggest part of the target, not the smallest that moves in unpredictable patterns.
Like police officers are being trained to take down opponents who outweigh them by 100 lbs.
You don't train one group of officers with one set of criteria, and another group with a different set. That creates more confusion in the deployment of force.
And I guess that is another "what if". What if the Wilson had been a female officer? Would the expectations have been the same? Would there have been rioting?
That DID NOT stop GW Bush from being elected, did it?
Why not fund cameras using the money they stole via civil forfeiture?
How generous of him and Michelle to dip into their personal fortune for this issue they care so much abo.... what? You say they're giving away other peoples money for this?
until it becomes illegal to switch them off.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Brown was hit with 4 non-fatal shots that would have stopped probably 95% of attacks, and kept coming. Remember, he was high as a kite at the time on weed and adrenaline. He didn't stop his attack until he took a round in the brain. Pistols are not really that effective at putting someone down quickly if they aren't afraid.
No amount of training would change the outcome in this case.
Never heard of "compression"? I'm not surprised when I see comments like this on some newspaper forum, but /.? I've got over 300 days of video in about 2TB.
I still have a problem with that. No amount of weed will keep someone from "not feeling" four gunshot wounds unless it was laced. And the toxicology only showed THC.
A GoPro is probably overkill. The purpose is just to record the events around the cop. A low resolution such as 640x400@10fps in B&W is probably sufficient.
Such a device could record hours of videos a day per GB and its electric consumption would only be a fraction of the GoPro.
Where in the constitution is the president granted power to offer government money to anyone? Oh, it's not there, that's congress's duty.
How far will 50,000 cameras go, nationwide, when the NYPD alone has some 34,500 troops?
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/h...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
start with traffic tickets no video = no ticket (even DUI's just to make the cops have the system working) with no need to go to court.
... isn't that the usual argument from proponents of surveillance on everybody else?
That said, there IS a problem with privacy, even though this video will technically become a public record. Police see people at their worst and most vulnerable moments, and there's a big difference between "one or two human beings saw me" and "video of me is plastered online". (Note - I'm not talking about criminals, I'm talking about victims, or people in accidents, or medical emergencies.) Access to the video should be limited the same way that crime scene and autopsy photos are limited (or supposed to be) - anyone can look in city hall, but not copy or distribute. OTOOH video being "lost" or "missing" is blatant evidence that someone is hiding something.
Adrenaline absolutely will. Adrenaline can make you not feel pain at all.
And the bullets themselves don't have any stopping power, only the tissue damage they do. You do the math and a 5g bullet going 200m/s has enough momentum to push a 125kg man back at a whopping 8mm/s. This isn't like the movies where you shoot somebody yippie ki yay motherfucker and they go flying back 8 feet.
There is no "shooting to wound." The gun should only come out when there is a threat to life that must be stopped. If the threat isn't so great that maiming somebody is the appropriate use of force then the gun should never come out in the first place.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You're forgetting the matching funds. It's $3,000/bodycam.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Assume for the moment that the grand jury made the right decision in this instance, and that the officer had a video camera and what it showed matched all the evidence that the grand jury based its decision on.
How many believe this would have stopped, or even reduced, the riots?
Regardless of all the other considerations, what about the actual storage? 50,000 cameras that are filming most of every day is a lot of video footage. How are they storing the video, and using what rules (i.e. how long it is kept for etc...). (or even how it can be searched for or retrieved with that much video)
Just managing the storage requirements could be daunting, particularly if the Feds are picking up the cost for the units, but the local cop departments have to somehow be IT experts?
If the crime happens in public, and it IS a crime, I paid, I want to see it. Even if I have to wait til court is over, but as public OWNER of the footage I demand to see a return on my investment. Protect the innocent by holding the film 'till after court. If they are guilty release it, if not, it wasn't a crime and it's no ones business. Whatever I do with MY footage then, is MY business. Fuck the guilty.
Police officer finds 9-year old girl, unconscious behind some bushes IN A PUBLIC PARK, completely nude and obviously the victim of a sex assault. The scene is captured on camera.
Using this real life scenario, care to run your "I paid, I want to see it" rant by me again? Are you really that obtuse or unable to think analytically that you fail to see how your idea is utterly idiotic?
I don't know the specific in this case because of course I didn't RTFA, but while Congress must pass legislation to allow for new spending (which is how the Republicans are proposing to stop the immigration EO) there is usually a wide degree of latitude given to the Administration on how to spend existing department budgets. A proposal like this might just come out of 'petty cash' of the DOJ or some other Federal agency which, if the case, is a sad comment as to how bloated some of these agencies are.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
In a DUI case, the prosecution withheld the video evidence. Since a suite of other charges (something like 12 additional charges) had been added to the DUI--resisting, assault on officer, ...--the video was possibly exculpatory. When the defense lawyer pointed out that prosecution had not turned over the dash cam video as requested, the judge stopped proceedings and ordered the prosecution to produce the tape. He was mad, too, you could tell. IIRC, he said 24 hours or you'll be in contempt and we'll have a mistrial. Jury was dismissed until the tape was located.
When we came back, the tape was played. *Somehow* the tape showed the cops driving up to the scene, then 20 minutes of snow, then magically cleared back to normal video showing the tow truck removing the accused's car.
Because of that tape being withheld and then magically showing nothing for the duration of the event in question (erased? disconnected?), when we deliberated, the first thing we did was ignore all the tacked on charges. We considered and convicted on the DUI based only on the fact that the wreck happened and the BAC test was positive. Because of the prosecution and police actions with the tape, we basically ignored every word of testimony from officers on the scene and never considered a single charge except the original DUI.
As it turned out, we found out in sentencing that it was the 8th DUI for the guy, and the judge expressed his opinion that we had done exactly right in finding as we did for the other charges. He had words for the prosecution that were probably pretty damning for a judge not on a TV show.
nm
they robbed store and that was on the camera.
WTF is going on in that ferguson????
Sure, but in the US we don't allow summary execution for robbery. The fact that the guy who was gunned down is a scumbag isn't really relevant to the question as to whether there was misuse of lethal force.
Burning down the city isn't an appropriate response to all of this nonsense, but this was really just the spark that lit a powder keg. Cameras and openness make for good relationships in general. Lots of cities have cases where black people get shot by white cops and there aren't these kinds of reactions because the police have good relationships with the people being policed. Even so, I advocate cameras everywhere. They help defend the innocent as much as they indict the guilty.
That doesn't work on the 2-hour battery life, and the video is already compressed. Tell me how your double-compression goes. Maybe compress it until the file is one bit?
For a GoPro, the size is a benefit. You get great stills from it, able to read license plates, and other things that help in a criminal investigation. Compressing it until it's unusable doesn't sound like a good idea. No, you can't CSI enhance it until it's clear again, either.
Learn to love Alaska
A GoPro with mods to record that long would be that (if not more), and you need $50 per day or so to store the recorded media. So somewhere around $20k for one year operational cost. $1500 is a steal.
Learn to love Alaska
After I read Wilson's testimony, I agree. When he got shot, stumbled a bit off, then turned around and started running at him that must have been his bodies "last ditch adrenaline survival dump". What REALLY got me was how often Wilson's fire arm malfunctioned, like 3-4 times. And he had no flashlight, mace, etc within reach in his car either. So, broken gun and no equipment? Ever law enforcement vehicle I've ever seen has that HUGE flashlight right there locked into a recharger. I almost think he might have shot him so many times from fear of his gun continuing to malfunction.
h.264 is not the best compression format. It has many highly useful features for videos, yet 32gb for eight hours should be able to be "adjusted down" using a different codex if you don't need Blueray-quality videos (which is what that is at 720). I'd be surprised if such a "hitech" camera wouldn't allow you do dial it down to 480, which would double the 8hr. As for battery life...well, that's an entirely different subject lol.
If you compress it as much as you are advocating, you'd lose some detail that may be useful in fighting crime. Storage is cheap, and CSI-level "enhance" doesn't exist. Capture the higher quality. It's a better choice for that use.
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