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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."
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.
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.
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Doesn't it seem likely this policy will prevent a certain element of LEOs from using the Taser at all?
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I want to see the events that led up to the Taser deployment.
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.
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Apparently LAPD regards LA as a wartime battlefield, with the public as the enemy by default.
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.
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So record a 30-minute loop all the time and if some kind of event happens, aoutmatically store the last 15 minutes and the following 15 minutes. The storage could be triggered by gunshot sound, tazer use, or manually, by the policaman. It's not difficult, dashcams for cars work like this (with automatic storage if certain levels of G-force are detected).
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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.