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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.
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.
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.
The respect issue goes both ways. A lot of cops don't work in the neighborhoods that they live in. They either can't afford to live there, like in Boston, or don't want to live there, like [insert ghetto / slum of your choice here]. There is very often an "us versus them" mentality where everyone is treated like a terrorist or felon. Really hard to show respect to authority when it seems to be stepping on your neck all of the time. A lot of cops are professional in these instances, but a lot of cops also feel that they are going on combat patrol in a foreign country and act accordingly. Where do you see good police / citizen interactions? Places where the police actually live where they patrol and patrol where they live.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.