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LAPD Orders Body Cams That Will Start Recording When Police Use Tasers
HughPickens.com writes: Lily Hay Newman reports that the LAPD has ordered 3,000 Tasers which, when discharged, will automatically activate cameras on officers' uniforms, creating visual records of incidents at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers. The new digital Taser X26P weapons record the date, time, and duration of firing, and whether Taser wires actually strike suspects and how long the thousands of volts of electricity pulse through them. "This technology gives a much better picture of what happens in the field," says Steve Tuttle.
The idea of using a Taser discharge as a criterion for activating body cams is promising, especially as more and more police departments adopt body cams and struggle to establish guidelines for when they should be on or off. Police leadership — i.e., chiefs and upper management — is far more supportive of the technology and tends to view body-worn cameras as a tool for increasing accountability and reducing civil liability. On the other hand, the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations. "In addition to these new Taser deployments, we plan to issue a body-worn camera and a Taser device to every officer," says Police Chief Charlie Beck. "It is our goal to make these important tools available to every front line officer over the next few years."
The idea of using a Taser discharge as a criterion for activating body cams is promising, especially as more and more police departments adopt body cams and struggle to establish guidelines for when they should be on or off. Police leadership — i.e., chiefs and upper management — is far more supportive of the technology and tends to view body-worn cameras as a tool for increasing accountability and reducing civil liability. On the other hand, the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations. "In addition to these new Taser deployments, we plan to issue a body-worn camera and a Taser device to every officer," says Police Chief Charlie Beck. "It is our goal to make these important tools available to every front line officer over the next few years."
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Why not start recording when the taser is drawn?
Slow motion taser footage... in HD
This sounds positive, but it won't capture what happened before the tazing. I'll be impressed when the apply it to handguns so you can see, for instance, if a cop who claims he is "defending himself" actually was taking pot shots from 150 ft at someone running the other way.
Those cameras need to record everything up to and including the taser shot.
This is a waste of time and money that adds no value.
I like the idea of recording use of weapons. They should add a small camera to the barrel of every gun. It eases the overwhelming "cameras on officers at all times" - which has raised both privacy and data pollution questions, and also the concern that cameras NOT on at all times will lead to officers selectively editing their interations. A camera on every taser and every gun barrel would allow us to "ease into" the monitoring business.
Gently reply
How about as soon as the holster for the taser (or gun) is unsnapped?
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This is kind of putting the cart before the horse ain't it? What good is video of someone being tazzed when we still don't know WHY the officer thought it was necessary to incapacitate the person.
The video feed should start just before the police engage a suspect. That means when you get pulled over, before they even say anything, the camera should already be running. After the stop, turn the camera off.
This would be great for everyone. People are more likely to behave while on camera and if people would be less mouthy with police, things would escalate a lot less frequently.
Boo fucking hoo. It's obviously a technology story. Save this gripe for later today when something that ISN'T appropriate shows up on Slashdot. This story is fine.
..."the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities..."
Since when are public servants due any privacy while conduction their duties out in the open?!
I think this is much better than the always-on cams the police clearly don't like. It doesn't make sense to record going to the bathroom, talking to victims and informants, making chitchat in the cruiser about coworkers, ad nausem. Just record the altercations, and this is a good start.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If LAPD or US cops have nothing to hide then why not have their privacy invaded by perpetual recording cameras (while they are on duty)? I mean... unless they have something to hide or doing things they shouldn't like violating the law?
Exactly. If the police get to unilaterally characterize what happened up to the point of tasing, what the hell does it matter that we've got footage of the hapless subject on the ground convulsing? How about if we throw the police in jail and start recording the court proceedings as soon as the iron door has slammed shut on them as they start their sentence, sounds like about the same thing.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations.
If you are tasering someone, you are basically assault/battery of someone. That hardly seems like a minor issue, especially if I do to to a police officer they will try to send me to jail for a couple years.
They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
So Club Club Zap Click?
They probably try to avoid torturing with Tasers. This happens when the Taser is activated multiple times or for extensive durations (e.g. 3 minutes, causing death)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Sure it is - the police routinely wear all kinds of other equipment, packing 6 phone batteries around their belt will not exactly be hard.
The recent push for officers to wear body cams, at least in the United States, has mainly been driven by incidents in which black men have gotten killed during encounters with the police.
Whenever one of these incidents occurs, and there's no footage of the incident, we immediately hear from so-called "activists" how the men involved allegedly hadn't done anything to provoke the use of deadly force. We even hear this in cases where there's ample, indisputable evidence to show that the men involved had just committed serious and often violent crimes, including robbery and assault, just minutes before the encounter with police (see the Michael Brown case, for example).
So this makes me wonder, what will be the response when these cameras do capture indisputable footage of these men attacking the police officers, and the police officers making very reasonable and justifiable use of deadly force?
When the police officers are vindicated, will the activists accept this fact? Will they accept that just maybe the people who got shot were fully responsible for what happened?
Will the activists even start calling for the cameras to be removed? In some ways, they're better off with a lack of evidence and some uncertainty; at least then their claims aren't obviously false.
These are interesting times we live in, my friends. I just hope that justice and the truth prevails, even when it's a truth that activists might not like.
At the very least, it should start recording when the taser is released from its holster - and ideally, the camera should be recording before the weapon is even out of its holster.
Well, how about starting them as soon as a weapon gets unholstered. Gun or taser doesn't matter. OK, the event that made the cop unholster the weapon isn't recorded but everything from that moment is. If the opposing party decides to back off then there would hardly be any need to shoot them anyway.
it might invite over-managing minor policy violations.
Have you heard of the broken windows theory? It may not be appropriate when applied to citizens, who are supposed to be presumed to be the masters of government, not its servants. However, when a person is acting in a public service position that has extraordinary authority and hence extraordinary responsibility, broken windows is far more appropriate.
LEOs are supposed to get in trouble for minor policy violations, and major policy violations should be virtually unheard of. Were we not on the wrong side of that balance, we would not have to implement solutions like this. The few bad cops did this to you. They are the worst enemy of good cops. Go put those mutts in jail, make that the new normal; then we'll talk about easing up on the surveillance.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How the hell will they be able to sit in the donut shops then. The last thing we need is hungry officers who are pissed off they can't take a break when they feel like it.
>The weapons ordered by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) will be linked via Bluetooth Technology to Taser International’s body cameras, turning on the camera the second the Taser’s safety switch is thrown.
They start recording before the taser is fired.
Doesn't it seem likely this policy will prevent a certain element of LEOs from using the Taser at all?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Turing on the camera AFTER the taser hits only lets us (the cop-cam viewers) see if the cop then refuses to call in the subject's distress when a pacemaker goes on the haywire or if the subject suffers an epileptic fit.
The point of the body cam is to record the actions before the use of force, to determine whether on not excessive force was used, and secondarily whether alternate tactics would have had a better outcome. At a minimum, turn on the camera when the officer exits the vehicle so as to get context; if necessary, the camera can erase non-force exits after vehicle re-entry to prevent using up all the recording time.
Of course, my algorithm fails for foot patrol officers. Perhaps for them, record minute long segments and discard and record over any too long before a triggering event like the taser discharge, then convert the (timestamped, of course) segments into a continuous record as needed. This requires a bit of controlling intelligence on either the body cam or a worn pack, but shouldn't require too heavy a controlling unit, I should think.
"You want it -- you got it! Only we'll be sure to make bodycams useless." [LAPD] Recording after discharge only captures the damage done for which there is also medical evidence. As mentioned side-thread, it does not record what lead up to the discharge and justifies it. Or not.
Some Police officers may dislike continuous monitoring. (I suspect many don't mind, probably the more honest.) Yet monitoring is routine, nearly universal in the private sector anywhere a dispute may arise. Often at police recomendation!
Do Police Officers think they are "Special"? If so, it is the "short bus" kind :)
The camera only starts when the taser is fired? Wow. No context at all leading up to that. Useless.
I want to see the events that led up to the Taser deployment.
Obviously the thing to do would be to shoot first and then use the taser to avoid showing use of excessive force.
Sure it is - the police routinely wear all kinds of other equipment, packing 6 phone batteries around their belt will not exactly be hard.
Also, you don't need super high resolution or frame rate, nor is color really necessary. 640x480 and 3 fps in B/W would be "good enough" 99% of the time.
They probably try to avoid torturing with Tasers. This happens when the Taser is activated multiple times or for extensive durations (e.g. 3 minutes, causing death)
Well, torture is certainly something that we'd want to avoid... But I agree with someone further up, this trigger for recording misses the circumstances leading up to the event. Was the person actually a threat? is one of the important questions that remain unanswered. Technically the continuously overwritten ring buffer seems hardly more difficult to implement.
Btw, I found this turn of phrase in the story a bit unsettling:
unfair intrusion into their routine activities
Tasering is a routine activity now? I would hope not, although it is better than discharging live rounds at unarmed kids of course.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
1. Corrupt officers will always find a way to have their recording equipment 'become ineffective' when they are doing illegal things, like provoking suspects....
2. Corrupt justice officals will always find a way to tamper with evidence so it becomes damaged or lost.
3. It is up to Citizens to be the Watchers, and post the raw video of incidents to Social Media, like youtube, and get the word out.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
We have cameras on our phones. Why can't we get cameras on our guns too? It could activate simply when you draw the gun. One of the biggest problem is that dead people can't tell their version of the story. The gun with the built-in camera would record the events immediately before the shot was fired, you can determine from that if the assailant was really coming towards the officer or if he had his hands up in self-defense.
They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
Why erase it at all? Storage is so cheap, there's no need to overwrite it in the camera.
A GoPro can record 8 hours on a 32GB memory card, so stick 64GB of memory in the body camera and it can record for over 16 hours with a large enough battery pack (which needn't weigh more than the taser that he's already carrying). Power the cop's radio off of the same battery so if the battery is dead he loses radio contact to make it more obvious that the battery is dead.
When his shift is done, he plugs the camera into a charger/camera reader, and video is uploaded to the departmental servers. In a 100 officer department, if each generates 40GB of data/day, that's only 4 TB/day, or 120TB if they retain if for a month. That's less than a $15,000 array - $150/officer.
Apparently LAPD regards LA as a wartime battlefield, with the public as the enemy by default.
For some rough numbers, at 5V a raspberrypi A+ takes 500mA plus 250mA for the camera ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/hel... ). Maplin sell a 5V 10Ah portable battery pack (for charging phones and tablets) which weighs 330g ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/mapl... ). So off the shelf hardware gives you a 13 hour battery life.
I assume if energy efficency is your goal you could do a bit better.
Trigger the camera start when the Taser is removed from its holster.
The same can be done for all weapons the officer wears. This way you have a record of what the target is doing BEFORE they get hit, sprayed or shot.
Police may not be quite so quick to draw their weapon until it is really needed.
It's a great way to funnel tax money and illicit gains (civil asset forfeiture) to private companies, with no possible benefit to the public at large. After seeing someone choked to death by police, with nothing done about it, what possible use is any camera, before or after the taser flies, going to do?
Cameras should be on for the entire shift. It does no good to start a camera upon the release of a taser, because what we're really interested in is the circumstances that led up to the release of the taser. This is absolutely useless.
These are the same guys who broke the antennae off their cars to disable audio recorders that they had to wear. Nobody ever faced any punishment even though over half the antennae in one precinct had been broken off.
The cameras are good, but they need statutory backup making it a felony to not have the camera turned on. There also needs to be a statutory presumption that in the absence of camera footage anything the "defendant" says is considered absolute truth in court and the officer doesn't get to testify.
Without these basic laws in place (which no honest officer would disagree with, by the way) it's useless.
Do you have ESP?
(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack.
(2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell.
(3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This will lower taser use for sure, but increase the use of every other weapon.
Why on Earth would this not be the policy for discharging a gun first?
You need to see the scene before the cop uses the taser to make valid judgement on it's use.
They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
If the LAPD uses the same policy as other departments with body cams, the officer will be instructed to activate the camera whenever about to interact with the public. In which case, the Taser activation would be backup just in case that didn't happen for some reason.
When I was in the thirteenth grade I enrolled in Crim 110, the entry level class for cops. I needed a class to fill up my schedule to be a full-time student and met two people who became cops. One a California Highway Patrol officer, the other a San Diego Sheriff. The instructor was a retired police officer who shared many tales about his work. My car broke down when I was driving home from a friend's house and Tom the CHP officer stopped behind me, gave me a ride home, and called for a tow truck to .take my vehicle to my house. .
could be voice activated, or RFID'd to start recording when the officer gets out of their car -- plenty of ways to do it
Hitting center mass at 50 yards with a side arm is tough and beyond the requirements for any police department in the US. To put things in perspective, NYC block is about 75-100 yards.
Remember a 9mm is really only effective out to about 50 yards before it has slowed down enough that most of lethality is lost. (Obviously getting hit in the heart would end someone, but that's a tiny little target to hit beyond 50 yards)
Most situations where a police officer has to use a side arm are at 7 yards. And that is where the training and firing range practice start.
I worked in an engineering lab at MIT when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and we'd developed one of the first digital field seismometers, and we used a similar technique. Seismometers that were left in the field for weeks were designed to start recording on to mag tape when an event started, but the problem was you'd lose the crucial minutes *before* where interesting things might be happening. Memory was fabulously expensive, so we fed the data off the A/D converter into an array of discrete flip-flops that functioned as a shift register. When recording was triggered, the mag tape would start recording the seismic reading from thirty seconds ago.
The thing is, memory is *not* fabulously expensive anymore. You can find 128 GB USB flash drives for under $20 retail, so the memory chips must be tiny fraction of that. It should be feasible to record an officer's entire shift -- even a double shift -- from an affordable device. I think it's much more practical just to load up on memory than to try to wire up an patrolman with cables and switches. And as with a volcano exploding, the seconds, even minutes leading up to an event are crucial to understanding it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
n/t
If you expect cops to act in a reasonable and fair manner you are being unrealistic.
Cops are idiots.
Idiots do stupid things.
Give an idiot weapons and those weapons will be used in ways which may not be sensible.
But the alternative is ever worse.
No cops ? That means the law of the jungle will prevail,
and most of you will be eaten alive.
BOTTOM LINE :
Live in ways that don't bring the attention of the cops to bear on you. Honestly
it is not difficult to do this. Of course some people are just scum and scum will
act like scum and that will bring trouble to the scum.
It's impossible to have sympathy for scum like Mike Brown or that Garner idiot
who resisted arrest. You break the law, you ask for trouble and YOU GET TROUBLE.
As long as you act like a jerk you're going to be treated like a jerk. That is the way the
REAL WORLD works.
I was thinking motion activated. It would start recording when they get out of their car and while they walk around and keep recording for five or ten minutes after the motion has stopped.
A large reduction in taser use, higher reports of police brutality, slightly higher use of lethal force?
This whole "start the camera when taser is fired" is exactly the kind of contextless bullshit non-remedy I'd expect to be backed by a police union - nothing relating to the situation escalating will be on record until the person being tasered is looking like a drooling pants wetter - no way this becomes policy.
That's why the cameras of ALL police officers should be recording ALL THE TIME, with something like a 6 or 12 hour buffer - flash memory is cheap. When a noteworthy event (like a scuffle sensed, or gun / taser being drawn, or emergency radio message is sent), occurs anywhere in bluetooth proximity to a camera, the time is marked into the camera, preserving the recording X (like 20) minutes prior and Y (like 40) minutes after. This portion of the camera's buffer is preserved from being overwritten by ongoing recording until it has been confirmed successfully offloaded.
(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack.
(2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell.
(3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
My 4 oz bike can records about 3 hours on a charge... If 3 ounces of that is battery, that's a 12 ounce battery pack for 12 hours... Like I said , less than a police taser.
Since victims of police abuse know what time that abuse occurred, that takes care of the signal to noise ratio. Of course the data will be valuable to both sides.
Privacy concerns are taken care of just like all public records requests... Private images are filtered out when handing over the data.
So do we have amazing cameras that turn on when a cop is murdering someone with his handgun? Or how about when they pull their gloves on for an abusive cavity search aka rape?
It won't do any good unless they start fire officers for not using them.
The "oops it wasn't turned on| it was broken| forgot it| left it in the care", not only be grounds firing with prejudice, but also be cause for the prosecution to file police brutality.
So it changed nothing.
Nope. See http://www.salon.com/2015/01/1...
Not much of an issue since I'm sure we'll find them experiencing a quality drop in body cam's functioning properly in the near future to go along with the automated recording. That's what usually happens in these cases isn't it?
I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
I wonder how this would work battery-wise? It's not going to be useful if police require a car-battery-backpack to power the camera for a 10h shift...
Most devices I know aren't going to record continuously for half that time at any decent quality.
Tasering is a routine activity now?
If you read the summary you'll note that concern was with regards to when these cameras should be on vs. when they should be off. Should they be on while the officer is sitting in his patrol car doing paperwork, bitching to his partner about the litany of mundane things (both work related and personal) that co-workers across all professions bitch to one another about? I have friends and family in law enforcement and I'm generally supportive of body cams, but they're going to fundamentally change the nature of policing and not always for the better. Do you think you're going to get the polite "Please slow down." admonishment when you get pulled over by an officer wearing a body cam? Think your pot smoking kid gets the joint taken from him, ground into the dirt, and an admonishment to shape up his act? Not likely. It's going to be letter of the law by the book policing, with all the pros and cons that go along with that. On balance it's for the best but let's not pretend there won't be drawbacks to it or that there aren't legitimate concerns about the best way to implement such technology.
although it is better than discharging live rounds at unarmed kids of course.
Unarmed has nothing to do with whether or not someone is a threat that warrants the use of deadly force. There are a litany of informative articles that you can read on the subject if you're so inclined. Start by Googling "disparity of force" and "ability, opportunity, and jeopardy." Those are the standards taught to law enforcement (and armed civilians, incidentally) in all 50 States. If you're alluding to what happened in Missouri, I read the Grand Jury transcripts in their entirety, and if the Officer's testimony is to be believed his actions were completely justified. The Grand Jury apparently thought they were and the Feds haven't bothered to bring charges against him.
I wonder what will happen to the "Hands up, don't shoot!" movement when we see another such incident happen with a body cam wearing officer who turns out to be completely justified in his actions? Will we still see the parade of childhood pictures of some 280 pound thug? Attention seeking asshats (*cough* Sharpton *cough*) jumping in for their share of the headline? Riots in the streets? I'm guessing that all of those things will happen, because these things have never been about justice, but are rather precipitated by a handful of assholes taking advantage of legitimate longstanding grievances in disadvantaged communities. It fits a narrative so let's run with it, never mind what the actual facts are on the ground.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers
It's a time of mounting political cycle and news cycle, not mounting reality.
Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
Prolouge: If you are thinking TL;DR, the few really important sentences are in bold.
First, my cynicism warns me this will decrease taser use...and increase firearm use. After all, everyone knows you don't bring a taser to a gunfight, and when was the last time you heard of a cop being attacked by a taser-wielding drug addict?
Second, I am not a police office or member of the "Justice System". I have a criminal record. The cops who arrested me did their job. I do disagree with cops who misuse what I consider overly broad powers. I am against legislation and policies that allow and even encourage a mentality in cops of "Everyone but us cops are just uncaught criminals". Laws and policies that make this a reality are repugnant to me, and to the very idea of any kind of democracy, especially a representative democracy.
Now, my proposal: I see some fairly easy solutions to a lot of the "problems" surrounding police body camera recording. I'm going to point out some fairly easy solutions, using current technology.
I am not affiliated with any company I mention here, in any way that I know of, I'm simply going to use one of the top 5 results from a google search when I need some basic facts. I use camera and recorder interchangeably in this posting.
If anyone wants to use these ideas, I'm giving them away for anyone to use as part of what I consider my civic duty. Of course, an acknowledgement would be nice. I am not going to attempt to patent any of these ideas, if I seem long-winded (TL;DR), I'm also trying to provide prior art so no one else can either. (civic duty, not duty to shareholders)
1. Power.
I suggest resonant charging, in-car, and at selected locations (for cops on foot/bike patrol).
I suggest resonant so that you can charge without removing the camera.
http://www.bodycameras.com/ [bodycameras.com] says their standard camera in continuous mode has 4 hours battery life, 10 with extended power/charger pack. The recharge time for the built in battery is 3 hours on USB via computer, wall, or vehicle. The USB 2.0 standard for a desktop is to supply 5V at 500mA which is 2.5 Watts.
Car patrols could have an in-car charger, and so they would only need the built-in battery and a resonant car charger, assuming these cops spend about half the time in the car and resonant charging can supply 2.5 watts of charging. Even less time in the car is needed if they leave the camera in the car and thus charging during lunch breaks. Less time yet if the camera and charger can handle a 5 or even 10 watts of charge. Foot officers could use the extended pack, or possibly even the built-in battery if enough charging locations are on their patrol route. Businesses on the route might even be willing to pay all or part of a chargers price in return for increased police presence at their location. Some planning is required here to insure enough chargers/charging time on every route.
The camera MUST have an easily viewable and understandable charge indicator.
Then it is the officers responsibility to either keep their camera charged, or immediately report in any failure of the camera/battery/charging system.
If an officer can't handle that small added responsibility, I would question giving them the responsibility of carrying a firearm which requires much more in the way of maintenance.
Bonuses: No need for the police station to have "charging docks", simply charging "shelves" for cameras not in use. No more corroded contacts, busted battery clips, broken dock contacts, and less warranty repairs for the manufacturer. The exact design might be as simple as a shelf system where each shelf holds x number of cameras. It might require some innovation or cooperation in the wireless charging field, such as dual wireless charging, with resonant in the field and inductive in a dock type shelf at the station (think pigeonhole desk with slighty larger holes).
2. Activation/Officer privacy.
This
Well, how about starting them as soon as a weapon gets unholstered. Gun or taser doesn't matter. OK, the event that made the cop unholster the weapon isn't recorded but everything from that moment is. If the opposing party decides to back off then there would hardly be any need to shoot them anyway.
I think the event would almost always be recorded as it would be ongoing. If the suspect was charging the cop, if there was a struggle over the gun, and in those scenarios where the cop is ordering a suspect to stop, get on the ground, etc. Or to use your characterization a moment would be captured where the suspect is not backing off. Such a moment is enough to clear the cop.
Record when unholstered is far better than record when fired.
remarkably often [for the instances where the weapon is discharged], there is very little time between unholstering the weapon and discharging it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
Probably not even that. Just like other occupations, they take breaks. Even if the battery only lasted 2 hours,
a simple beep that tells them to return to their car and swap to a new battery would be sufficient.
The gopro advertises 2.5 hours with their regular battery and 5 hours with their extended battery: http://gopro.com/support/artic...
So using the extended battery and swapping out the battery halfway thru your shift would be sufficient even if they went with the gopro
but surely they could get one optimized to have a longer battery life as there is no reason a police body cam needs the same quality
as a gopro. Basically, the battery life is a non-issue.
then they'll just sit in the car and taz you as they drive by....(so you are also out of range of the dash cam, making a grab through the window for their gun)
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
camera will turn on when the TASER safety is turned off...usually long before actual discharge.
The camera should be recording a few minutes prior to the event. To ensure that all actions and process are handled properly. Similar to security cameras, record 5 or 10 minutes and then overwrite with newer actions.
Thats handy, record after the victim is down already... How about start recording when officer leaves hes vehicle? And prevent later editing of videos or erasure in case officer happens to brake the law...
The cops will just shoot you or beat you senseless with a baton instead. Or even strangle you with bare hands ... How convenient is that taser-activated camera, indeed!
This is nothing else but a nice juicy piece of pork for Taser and some politicians getting contributions/kickbacks from them, "sold" to the public as a mean to improve the excessive force use.
That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.
I don't know about where you live, but here cops have 8 hour shifts same as everybody else.
Your bias is making my browser non-horizontal.
Requiem for the American Dream
Aren't they authorized to taze citizens in their downtime (e.g. on the donut run after work and when cruising ?) If so, maybe the battery should be able to cope with the daily amount time they are able to taze ppl?
Requiem for the American Dream
Anything but always-on is subject to exploitation by the police or indeed those in the process of being judged and executed.
Requiem for the American Dream
"Your honor, the perp threatened my life one nanosecond before recording started so I felt I had to taze him to death for the sake of the children."
Requiem for the American Dream
Your bike weight 4oz? What's it made of? Probably not carbon steel or aluminium, I'm thinking.
Requiem for the American Dream
Even easier than that, The battery only needs to be a simple slide in unit. If the battery lasts 2 hours, and the car has a charger with a second, third, or even forth battery ready to go, the cops don't even need to add the extra weight of all the batteries.
This is exactly what they should do. The bodycam should be _always recording_ in a 10 minute continuous ring buffer.
If the Officer calls in an emergency or unholsters or uses handcuffs, a taser, firearm, handcuffs, or other weapon, or if shots are fired, then recording should start and include the 10 minutes before the incident, and continue recording 10 minutes after all police accessories are re-secured.
Yep, if the cop is armed with any weapon that would allow for a "in the line of duty" to be used as a defense, a camera should be recording. If the cop needs a non-recorded break, they all of his weapons should be secured in a way that he does not have access to them until the cameras are recording again.
That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.
It's not 24/7. The batteries only need to last for say their 10-hour shift; perhaps some extra capacity just in case.
The body cam can also shut off, when the Officer steps in their squad car, and use a break-away charging connector like Magsafe, so the camera automatically turns on and starts recording when the officer leaves their squad car.
They could also have a mechanism to occasionally transmit image capture frames to dispatch along with GPS position, so they will be able to see the Officer is OK, provide continuous tracking history of their location at time X, and what any officer's last position was at any point in time to send help, if there is a problem.
STFU. Today's whine-meme is *beta*.
Requiem for the American Dream
Or to use your characterization a moment would be captured where the suspect is not backing off. Such a moment is enough to clear the cop.
Not necessarily. Just because a suspect is not backing off does not mean the officer in the right. If the cop is charging at a 'suspect' with a weapon, without explanation or addressing them or refused to prove their identity as a legitimate police officer, then the suspect could very well be legally taking any actions to defend themselves.
Memory is not the problem. "Permanent storage" becomes the problem when you are recording whole shifts. Any record, including recordings, must be maintained for a set period of time. 24/7 recordings will require departments to run, or contract with, data farms to store all of these videos. Then you have to get into the costs of employees to maintain the data storage devices, backup old videos onto other media, fulfill requests from the courts and attorneys, fulfill open records requests, etc. Like many things, in theory this is all great until people see the price tag to make it a reality.
I don't think the point of drawing the weapon is early enough either.
When I hear the testimony in many of the questionable cases, I get the impression that the officers have charged in and escalated the situation to the point that is becomes violent and dangerous. That is behavior that we should capture and use to uncover the needed improvements in public safety.
There are disciplines, such as psychiatric care, that deal with agitated and violent people routinely, where lethal force is simply not an option. People in those positions usually have training in verbal deescalation and non-lethal containment techniques that reduce the chance of injury to both sides. There are a lot of things that can be resolved simply by dropping the "I'm a bad ass and you must obey" attitude. It isn't about abandoning the authority of the position, it is about exploiting normal human behavior to your advantage. And, it isn't a matter of years of professional training, either. Nurse's aids with GEDs are trained in the basics in a couple of hours.
If you are trained to resolve a situation with an unarmed individual by using lethal force, there is a problem with the training. Until we fix that, people will continue to die needlessly, on and off camera.
They can still turn the cameras on earlier manually. This just forces them to turn on if the officers use their tasers.
Isn't this the same department that has been caught actively destroying their cruiser recording equipment, installed specifically because of abuse concerns? Unless the video is instantly uploaded to remote, third party servers and there are SEVERE penalties for damaged equipment or "malfunctions" then its not going to really mean anything. If officers think they're in the right they'll keep the footage, if they thing they did something wrong there will be an "accident" with it resulting in loss of the video/audio.
For answer, refer to question.
Requiem for the American Dream
Honestly? No, it doesn't. I cannot imagine a single scenario involving an unrecorded encounter with an officer, where the officer would decide to not use a taser if the officer knew that doing so would cause the event to begin being recorded. If the officer knew that the event was being recorded from the get-go, yes, I can see that influencing the officer's actions. But I simply cannot imagine a situation in which recording the event post-tase would cause the officer to rethink the tase.
But maybe I just lack imagination.
Your bike weight 4oz? What's it made of? Probably not carbon steel or aluminium, I'm thinking.
Autocorrect typo, I figured most people could figure it out by context: can==cam.
What? That's stupid.
Unless we also put cameras on guns, there are pigs who will never touch their taser, but grab a gun instead.
To get the pigs under control, we need two things - always-on body cameras, and an automatic independent non-police, non-DA investigation with the power to fire the pig and file criminal charges automatically happening with EVERY use of force.
America is already a police state. The pigs MUST be brought under control, or it will rapidly get worse from here.
Sorry, late reply and not much time... Just wanted to point out that yes there are cases where unarmed folks are a real threat (Chuck Norris et al, or the severely deranged or psychotic, say due to substance abuse).
But mostly the mere fact that LEO are armed should be sufficiently threatening to subdue and solicit cooperation of unarmed individuals. So when shots are fired in such circumstances it merits rigorous scrutiny via a transparent investigation.
Second, the Grand Jury system as I understand it is a bit of a quirky thing, discarded in most places except the U.S. It was meant as a protection of the public from excessive use of executive power, but arguably used in cases such as Ferguson to the opposite effect. Why not simply a regularly prosecuted case?
Finally, your argument that bodycams will mean that "friendly" and informal police actions like letting people off with warnings for minor offenses... That is a good thing. Because it is arbitrary judgment on the part of the officer in question, as to what constitutes "minor" and when to exercise such leniency, and as such is subject to bias. That you would mention this suggests to me you probably don't belong to a group regularly considered victims of the corollary "bad" kind of police bias.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
They could have camera that could record the cop's entire shift. That's what it should be. Any missing footing or timelapses? Automatic suspension and investigation.
Your welcome to record yourself. As soon as I see flashers coming my way I hit record and place my phone, camera facing forward in my front pocket with the LED light turned on for good measure. Tempted to post the video where a cop asked me if my telescope was a bazooka but I do try to be responsible with recording other people and haven't had much luck getting ahold of the guy to get his permission.
Here someone will say "what about if they go to the bathroom"?
Don't point your camera at your dick. The most anyone will get out of it if you don't point your camera at your dick is the sound of you loudly farting while you use the facilities. Who cares.
Eight hours of digitally recorded video and sound every day. Maintain video on file for 7 days unless something specifically comes up. Then back up the portion of the video that is relevant.
Total cost is about 100 dollars a decent camera. Maybe 20 to 50 dollars for a battery that can drive it, plus how many ever gigabytes of space is needed for 8 hours times six memory cards because I can assume the police do not work seven days a week.
That is the cost.
Anything beyond that is someone getting fancy. You want to buy a special camera that costs 200 dollars? Fine. You're mostly paying the government mark up but whatever. You pay over 1000 and you're just wiping your asses with taxpayer dollars.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
TO put a good figure on it. Using my SIII, 12FPS, color, 720p recording straight to google's servers. Surprisingly little battery usage, have recorded a room to catch someone doing something illegal for 2 hours off the stock battery. From what I seen color quality and resolute doesn't matter as much as compression and framerate. Spend a little more battery on compressing to h.264 and you'll save a helluva lot more battery life on data transfer.
What a stupid idea. Let's have cameras record what happens after, and none of the events leading up to the usage of the weapon. I think the latter is far, far more important.
A cop's entire day should be recorded, not just when he decides to use force.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
One big problem would be battery life. There was a fatal police shooting recently which the police officers' cameras apparently did not record. One reason I heard was that they have 3-hour batteries which are supposed to last for a 12-hour shift. At the very least you have to keep a charger and spare battery in the patrol car to make continuous recording work. Better if you could actually make a single battery last the whole time and take away any plausible reason for not having a recording.
Or raping woman (trading sex for tickets), or beating people with bats or fists, or shooting people
Just wanted to point out that yes there are cases where unarmed folks are a real threat (Chuck Norris et al, or the severely deranged or psychotic, say due to substance abuse).
Chuck Norris is a cute reference but in reality there are a nearly infinite number of factors that come into play. Gender, size, training, existing injuries, number of opponents, and so on. A fight might even start out as a normal fisticuffs where deadly force would not be permissible but escalate to a situation where the defending party is too injured to continue to defend themselves without resorting to deadly force. If you beat the snot out of me to the point that I'm about to pass out I'm well within my rights to shoot you, since I'll no longer be able to defend myself whilst unconscious. If you come after me with three of your friends I'm well within my rights to resort to deadly force, since even a well trained individual is not likely to prevail against 4 to 1 odds. Ditto if you've got 200 pounds on me. The relevant term is "disparity of force" and it seems to have applied in the incident in Ferguson.
But mostly the mere fact that LEO are armed should be sufficiently threatening to subdue and solicit cooperation of unarmed individuals.
Which is what happens the lion's share of the time. Cases where the suspect surrenders without a fight don't make the news though.
Second, the Grand Jury system as I understand it is a bit of a quirky thing, discarded in most places except the U.S. It was meant as a protection of the public from excessive use of executive power, but arguably used in cases such as Ferguson to the opposite effect. Why not simply a regularly prosecuted case?
Grand Jury is part of the prosecution in the United States. Before you can be prosecuted for a felony offense the Government needs to secure an indictment against you. This is the job of the Grand Jury. The standard they must meet is significantly lower than a Petit Jury at trial, which must find beyond a reasonable doubt with a unanimous ruling that you committed the crime in question. The Grand Jury need only find that there's probable cause you committed the crime in question. They do not need a unanimous ruling to do this, simply a majority of the empaneled Grand Jurors must vote for indictment. The State is allowed to introduce evidence at Grand Jury that it would not be allowed to use at trial, like hearsay or illegally obtained evidence, and the deck is further stacked against the defendant in that if he chooses to testify he waives his right to be represented by counsel and his right to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him.
If the State can't meet this simplified burden of proof under rules that greatly favor it then what is the point of preceding to trial? More than 90% of cases presented before the Grand Jury result in indictment. The remaining cases are so exceedingly weak that there's less than zero chance they would result in conviction at trial were the Grand Jury system to be abolished. Additionally, it's mandated by our Constitution, so the process of abolishing it is not a simple one.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Needs to be thought about for the police too. They are people, and most people are not happy about being watched all the time. I mean think if you had a camera on you that recorded video and audio all day, every day at work. Might you feel a bit uncomfortable? I mean what if you and a coworker are sitting in the break room, complaining, as people do, and later your boss decides to look over the footage because he can and then fires you for it?
So there are reasons to try and find a balance. One thing that could help is a pre-roll system. Security systems do that these days, they'll continuously loop the last 30 seconds or whatever of footage in a buffer and then when an event happens (motion, alarm, etc) they'll commit that to disk and continue recording from there.
Could do the same here. Have a buffer, probably more like a 5-10 minute one, and then commit that when a recording event starts. Recording events could be triggered by things like cruiser lights getting activated, taser/firearm discharge, noise above a certain threshold, manual officer triggering, and so on.
Then you get to see what happened in the immediate leadup to the trigger as well as the aftermath. Privacy at other times is maintained as it isn't recording all the time.
I have friends and family in law enforcement and I'm generally supportive of body cams, but they're going to fundamentally change the nature of policing and not always for the better. Do you think you're going to get the polite "Please slow down." admonishment when you get pulled over by an officer wearing a body cam? Think your pot smoking kid gets the joint taken from him, ground into the dirt, and an admonishment to shape up his act? Not likely. It's going to be letter of the law by the book policing, with all the pros and cons that go along with that.
Good, the best way to get rid of bad laws is to enforce them consistently. If rich or politically connected people's kids go to jail for a joint, those laws will be eliminated much sooner than if we wait til another 5, 10, 500 poor black people get killed by runaway police escalation. I'm in favor of that.
That was my first thought, too ... but then I realized that there's another sign that's even earlier -- a hand on the weapon.
My understanding is that officers are trained to put their hand on their weapon when they feel uneasy about a situation and they might need to use it.
It'd be nice if you could start the recording even earlier (possibly having a buffer that gets written to storage when the weapon is grabbed), but this would *also* give you the times when the officer put his hand on the weapon but *didn't* draw it.
It'd likely have some false positives (officers checking all of their gear), but you'd also be able to tell if you have officers who make it a habit of clutching their weapns all the time ... if you have some that seem to be a little more jumpy, you can turn their cameras to run all the time, and see if they're jumpy for every encounter, or only a subset of the population. (ie, if it looks to be racist).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
There needs to be restrictions on who can request the footage. I'm thinking individuals involved, and anyone acting on the behalf of said individual limited to friends, family, and lawyers.
I say keep it recording the whole shift. Public, private residences, does it matter? However, I don't think the footage should be reviewable to check for crimes. The footage should only be reviewable for complaints against the police. Maybe hot pursuits too, such as catching someone's face on the footage and needing to track that person down. Like, if a cop didn't get a good look. The footage should be destroyed after 6 months. Maybe much sooner. Maybe 60 days without any filed complaint?
Aren't tasers dangerous to those with heart conditioners?
The fact you call them pigs implies an obvious bias on your part. It is truly sad when there are people like you in the community. There are bad cops, but they are by far the minority, sadly though encounters with ignorant people like you almost always go bad as you are always looking to be aggressive against them.
That's just silly.
A cop should not have to disarm to use the pisser or walk into a bathroom to wash his hands where you might be using it. A cop should not have to disarm to eat lunch at a diner and his mere presence should not mandate that your conversations about not being able to find a girl friend or whatever in the booth behind him is being recorded and subject to public FOIA requests.
All cops who let bad cops stay cops are themselves bad cops.
Which is approximately 97% of them.
what about when using a gun?
In New Zealand, police tasers are equipped with cameras that start recording black and white video when they are turned on. Recently, using the taser video recording of an incident, it was established that two police officers had used excessive force and had given false evidence in court.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/n...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nationa...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/good-re...
It's a taser not a gun, it hurts not kills. Why all the fuss? Why are people such wimps nowadays? An electric shock is not the end of the world.
Of course he should. It is people like you that encourage police abuse of power that keeps them behaving so badly. There is no reason that a cop needs to be armed to take a piss. The rest of us take a piss without weapons every day. We eat dinner without weapons too.
After the fact is well past the circumstances of the situation.
At issue in almost all cases is the context and provocation.
Body cameras should trigger as soon as the officer leaves his vehicle.
Vehicles should have a continuous data stream in 360 degrees and
the vehicle data needs to be archived in the vehicle and also sent
as a stream to a safe archive. Interruption of the feed is likely as we
often see on live news spots but there is no reason the live cannot be
refreshed and or VALIDATED from a vehicle retaining a 100% precise full
record (cross validation of both is very possible).
The capacity and reliability of fast Flash memory removes historic concerns
about capacity in a portable device. In addition the vehicle location GPS+inerta
speed acceleration can be logged. Acceleration, seatbelt latch and unlatch, lights
and sirens can also trigger a variety of logging and notification events.
The critical issue is that the data be tamper proof by the officer and can be
downloaded and archived non destructively by others. i.e by supervisors and other
investigators arriving late to document the site. Multiple copies minimizes tamper risk.
A lot of this depends on products being available but cost and functionality are very
possible. Vehicles are not power constrained so it makes sense to anchor
a lot of features there.
Power and charging via breakaway clips removes dead battery mumble foo excuses.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
My bodycams start the instant blue flashing lights are detected within 100 yards and stops with an audible detection the instant a heavy steel door slams closed.
All humans who let bad humans stay (in society) are themselves bad humans. Which includes you.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
Nope. We found this thing called specialization a while ago now.
So society allocates different tasks to different people. And the police are the ones to which we allocate the first step of removing those whom we have decided don't belong in society. And we give them powers that the rest of us don't get to exercise in order to do that task. Which is why it's especially bad when they turn a blind eye to the bad cops who abuse those very powers.
Now and then some people actually need to be shot. This is one reason we let the cops carry guns.
Good point.
But it's a bit more complicated than that. Many people refuse to believe that their friends have done something "wrong" and will water it down in their own minds. Much like when parents refuse to believe than little darling Johnny could ever have done something like that.
I agree, the police force as an organisation (in each country) needs to put more focus on their members behaving property, and expelling those who don't, but at the same time, it's hard for people to punish their own friends (which are usually the people who are with them on the beat, and know they've done something wrong). Or they'll even believe that the act wasn't wrong.
Also, many police who would otherwise dob in their comrades do not for fear of repercussion.
There needs to be organisational change, but to call 97% of them bad is either mean-spirited or naive.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
A cop needs to be armed any time he is expected to be ready for duty which include taking a piss or eating a meal on his shift.the idea that this somehow encourages abuse of power is completely moronic and you should be ashamed of yourself.
If you disarm cops, you will end up with them begging for their lives just before being murdered like in france instead of taking the murderous thugs down and preventing them from killing more innocent civilians.
Those police fight tooth and nail against that organizational change.
Now sure a bunch of them are likely fear repercussions - but again they volunteered for the job of removing such people from society. They have a badge, courts tend to take them at their word - they expect the rest of us who have neither of those things to solve the problem while they cower in fear of repercussions? Again, they signed up for this very job. You declared "All humans who let bad humans stay (in society) are themselves bad humans. Which includes you" but police aren't bad when they don't do that exact job they signed up for???
Just look at the NYPD and their tantruming reaction to a mayor who dares tell them they shouldn't be stopping and frisking every black person they see, and maybe could they choke less people to death.
And yes 97% is probably an exaggeration. Those of us who are la abiding only care about the bad cops - they are the ones who can end our lives (figuratively or literally) on a whim. Common sense says to treat all cops as if they are in that category since you don't want to get it wrong the other way.
>> Those police fight tooth and nail against that organizational change
A lot do yes. Probably not all.
I completely agree, police could be doing a lot more to fix their problems.
>> Common sense says to treat all cops as if they are in that category
I treat cops on a case by case basis. Some have been real dicks, others have been polite and friendly. The ones I've had a problem with, I've been fine, but then I suppose I have the blessing of being white and well off.
-- Naya. I cant be bothered signing in.
What if they don't even use the taser? What if they just pull out the gun and shoot or use a choke hold? Then there's no recording. Seems like a large loophole to me.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
gday spot on , considering where i live Police officers all the way up to our state police comishener , he got 10 years for taking part in the " joke " the joke included officers going into a fish and chips shop explaining to the owner that cos they had a lot of work , if he needs their help in the future a weekly volantary contribution of $20 , ( customers were ignored ) would be acsepted , to vice , sb , drugs . one last opinion from me on this subject . officers take an oath ! so when they break the law , they are in fact breaking 2 laws .
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
gday , love the quote , if i ref you may i use it ( only in private conversation ) ?
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
We have the ability to have continuous recording so that when an incident starts to begin the reviewed recording to start from say T-minus 30 seconds before the trigger was pulled.
How about a pressure sensor or similar mechanism to start recording as soon as the taser is unholstered? Same could be applied to sidearms, could start recording even if an officer simply places their hand around the grip. Officers much more routinely place their hands on their weapons to be ready, compared to actually drawing them.
Seems like that type of event may warrant a recording as well.
Besides, cops seem all geared up in tactical battle rattle (stun grenades on occasion, multiple sets of cuffs, body armor, etc), what's another 12 oz external Lithium Ion battery pack?
You have been watching too many movies, and confused reality with fantasy. Sane people are well aware that if someone is going to lay in wait for a chance to kill a cop, the cop taking his gun into the toilet isn't going to save him
I don't think those terrorist in france were laying in wait when they killed those two cops- both of which ,, had they been armed could have not only lived but stopped the deaths of innocent civilians that happened after the execution of the cops.
I think maybe you wish life was a hollywood movie as reality has recently showed the failures of your fallacy. But i guess something like that will not stop you. You see, i said when they are required to be ready fir duty- you tried to change it to defendibg from an ambush. If we cannot addresss the statements actualky said without perverting it to fit the world as you want it, we cannot have a conversation.