Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
It's always entertaining to see you activists making these claims about police officers "taking pot shots from 150 ft at someone running the other way".
You guys have clearly never handled a firearm of any sort. If you had, you'd know how damn idiotic your claims are.
It takes a lot of raw skill, experience, training, practice, concentration and even luck to hit a relatively small and moving target, especially one that's moving away, from over 150 feet away, using a handgun. And that's under ideal, indoor conditions.
If you're so wrong about basic stuff like that, then I'm sure you're wrong about everything else you're going on and on about.
Recall that for a recent shooting of a 12 year old kid in the park the police released video footage. The footage was used in defense of the police actions. They showed a police car driving right up to the kid, getting out and shooting the kid. The cops thought that was perfectly alright because the kid had a gun and they couldn't know the gun wasn't real. But ask any cop in a european country how they would have handled it. First, it's suicidal because if the kid had really been dangerous the cop would have been dead with that maneuver. Second, they should have stayed at a distance and ordered the kid to put the gun down.
Now those cops and taser footage? Any action that the cops don't approve of would be seen (with sincere conviction) as a reason for tasering.
I want to see the events that led up to the Taser deployment.
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.