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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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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.
How about as soon as the holster for the taser (or gun) is unsnapped?
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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.
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.
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.
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Because 99 percent of what happens in a cop's day is mind numbing, boring shit. All we need is the video of the incident. Maybe it should also come on when they call in a stop but to run that thing 24/7 is ridiculous.
Doesn't it seem likely this policy will prevent a certain element of LEOs from using the Taser at all?
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"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 :)
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.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
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.
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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That's not the way do to it. The camera should be recording for the whole shift, but if the officer doesn't unholster a weapon, that day's footage gets erased at the end of the shift. If a weapon is drawn, footage around that event would be saved. Less privacy worries for the officers, and more incentive for them to resolve situations without firing.
A large reduction in taser use, higher reports of police brutality, slightly higher use of lethal force?
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).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Your bias is making my browser non-horizontal.
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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.
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.