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Seattle Police Held Hackathon To Redact Footage From Body Cameras
An anonymous reader writes: Hackathons are common these days, but you don't often hear about events hosted by law enforcement. That's what the Seattle Police Department did on Friday, with the solitary goal of finding a good way to redact the video streams taken by police body cameras and dash cameras. Seven different teams demonstrated solutions, but in the end, none thought automation could realistically handle the task in the near future. "The Washington State public records act requires that almost all video filmed by any government agency – including police – be disclosed upon request. The only real exception is for video which is part of an open case currently under investigation. However, various parts of the state code include other restrictions – the identity of minors cannot be disclosed. Requests from victims or witnesses who may be at risk if their identities are disclosed also must be honored. However in all such cases the video still must be released – it is just the faces or other potential identifying characteristics, which might include gender or even a person's gait – which need to be blurred and redacted." The city just started a pilot program for body-worn police cameras.
That's just it - as per the summary, there are some valid things worth redacting from videos. The problem, of course, is that the whole point of body cams was that we can't trust the police, so any means of redacting content which needs redacting will likely be used to redact anything which casts a bad light on the officers.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The problem, of course, is that the whole point of body cams was that we can't trust the police, so any means of redacting content which needs redacting will likely be used to redact anything which casts a bad light on the officers.
It will be redacted for FOIA requests. But the original video will still be available for other purposes. For instance, if someone sues the police for misconduct, they could subpena the original uncut video. If the police charge someone with a crime, then that defendant's attorney will also have access to the original video.
All the cops in my town are required to be licensed as medical first responders (one step below emt).
Also, many times it's not in a public space as it's not uncommon for an officer to enter a private home.
If dashcams are considered public then instead of sponsoring hackathons they need to change the laws.
There are many situations where someone calls 911 for medical or other reasons where they would not
want the content of the call or a video of them to be public. Police officers many times enter
private residents and might accidently stumble upon situations like someone who fell in the shower,
opened the door in their bathrobe, someone who had just got raped, or dozens of other situations where
you just got victimized and are disclosing very personal infomation either over the phone to the 911
operator or to the police when they arrive that you don't want and don't expect to be public data.
Police cams should be treated the same way as 911 calls and neither should be public without consent
of at least one person present at the scene (or their next of kin if they died). Allowing only a single
consent (instead of everyone present) and allowing next of kin to give that consent should strike a
good balance between keeping most situations private but still allowing easy access to prevent abuse
of power to restrict access.
We need to go past simple rules which can be changed at whim. We need to mandate encryption of all video and the decryption keys must be stored with a 3rd party who will only release an individual key in response to a court-issued warrant. Not just a court order that any court clerk can sign, but a full-blown judge-signed warrant. We also need official data-expiration policies such than anything older than a year is deleted unless there has been a petition to preserve it - and that's a mere petition to preserve, you'll still need a warrant to decrypt but preservation pending a warrant needs to be easy enough.
If we don't make access physically difficult (versus administratively difficult) it is inevitable that these videos will end up in databases the way license plate scans have. And ten years down the road when Moore's law has kicked up our computational power up by another 100x they'll be running facial recognition, voice recognition, engine-sound recognition, gait-recognition, etc on the videos and data-mining the F out of it so that it becomes a tool for oppression worse than no video at all.
There are a lot of valid reasons to make the video available to the police - better supervision, training (replay their own mistakes as well as study the mistakes of others), etc. But, everything in life is a trade-off and the price of those minor beneficial uses will be state abuse of the camera footage. The only way to preserve liberty is to design the system such that no one, no one at all, has unrestricted physical access to footage.