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Entering the Age of Body-Worn Police Cameras (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Cyrus Farivar writes about what's being called a new era in policing: the era of body-worn cameras. They're gaining a foothold in departments around the U.S. after a year of increasing tensions between police and citizens, caused by a series of high-profile shootings. Several research groups are busily evaluating how the cameras affect the way police do their jobs. Many officers welcome the technology — in addition to providing evidence backing up the use of force, it often helps with investigations, capturing details they may miss at the time of an incident. Farivar even goes through a couple of simulated encounters, while pretending to be a cop. The camera easily shows him everything he did wrong. In this way, police officers can also review encounters for training purposes. As more departments adopt them, it's looking like a win-win — police benefit, and the public gets access to some much-desired accountability.
... shall be counterbalanced by body-worn citizen cameras targeting the police.
A lot of the things that have happened recently in the U.S. could have been put to rest - one way or another - with first person video (and often multiple points of view).
Dash cams are great, and we should continue using them on EVERY car, but every officer should also have this kind of tech. There should also be punishments or reprimands if the device is turned off during a shift (malfunctions aside). The video should also be streamed to their vehicles and, perhaps, even relayed directly back to the station.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
This is an appropriate application of technology to remedy a system that has shown to have abuses of power.
And. It should be sold to those who police us as, "Well, if you have nothing to hide..."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
in addition to providing evidence backing up the use of force
If a police officer needs to use force for anything other than a massive shoot-out with criminal gangs then either he's failing as a police officer or America is failing as a civilisation. There are countries in the world where the police don't routinely carry guns. American police have killed more people in the first few days of the year than most countries do annually.
Police should be attempting to find alternatives to the use of force to resolve situations rather than backing it up.
One of the effects of body cameras is complaints against the police go down:
http://www.sandiegouniontribun...
http://www.cleveland.com/cityh...
http://www.policeone.com/offic...
Policing involves dealing with people who are motivated to lie; lie to the police and lie about the police. All cops hear all day long are lies lies lies and some of those lies get pointed at them. It's true that cops are less likely to abuse their position if they know they're being recorded but that also holds true for citizens lying about cops' conduct.
The net effect is complaints go down, but there are two forces giving rise to that effect; it's not just the police changing their conduct. Just sayin'
It always seems like there are tons of "research groups" investigating every move the government makes. Who is paying these groups? Follow the money. They aren't doing it for free.
Cops just turn off the cameras whenever they do something illegal anyway, like they do with dash-cams.
For any accountability to come from cameras, they have to be always on and impossible to disable.
What we really need are body-worn politician cameras and microphones. They should live stream 24/7 over the Internet and any interruption of signal should result in a thorough investigation.
Recordings are meaningless unless there is independent scrutiny of the recordings. Independent means not only LEOs and prosecutors. These 2 groups have an interest in covering up wrongful LEO behavior. Many recordings should not be made public because they can show victims on their worst day such as a sexual assault or domestic abuse victim. But outside of this envelope we need a coptube website.
Some will (rightly) point out the privacy problems of police executing a no-knock raid and getting film of the housewife traipsing about in her birthday suit.
Some of them will then proceed to blame the cameras rather than the [unconstitutional] no-knock raids. It's important to be able to clearly analyze the entirely of these situations and realize that the cameras are pointing out yet another reason existing abuses need to be extinguished.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I agree that its win-win. Still there are a few tech challenges:
1) Upload - forget streaming, way too much bandwidth (think 1000's of officers for a large city, not just ONE stream). Will require wired connection and daily time for each officer.
2) Storage - need to keep YEARS of data for on-going and potential court cases.
3) Search and retrieval
[Insert pithy quote here]
Having footage of actual events is generally a good thing but my worry is that the footage may get edited in "post production" so to speak. Look at any reality TV show and it's pretty easy with some clever (or not so clever) editing to make someone appear far worse or far better than their actual actions. How long before cops learn how to start editing their footage? Who watches the watchmen? I know this stuff is covered under chain of evidence rules but I suspect there will be some loopholes and unforeseen problems to deal with.
Sometimes these cameras amazingly malfunction...right during a fatal shootout with a suspect. Then they magically come back on, as if an unknown force doesn't want to be held accountable. it's amazing.
And it is quite foolish to assume that cops want to actually be held accountable. Citizens need to get their own body cams or use apps like Bambuser and Cell 411 to notify each other when they encounter police. Theses types of apps that stream live video are especially necessary for activists and people involved in police encounters on a regular basis. Cops have erased video from citizens' devices in the past in order to destroy evidence, so it is not wise to assume their body cams are there for our protection.
then no video = no ticket no court even for DUI and for DUI $75 HR + all costs to the person locked up.
There is going to be increasing surveillance of public behavior in the decades to come. Police cameras seem inevitable. Human memory is just so unreliable that recording what actually happened will be overwhelmingly attractive. And sports have shown us what regular review of video can do to enhance performance. We'll have to be strategic in regulating access to these videos since they could become another piece of a comprehensive surveillance network that could enable those in power to suppress dissenters. It seems that recording is going to happen. The question is about how those in power are held accountable for how they use recordings.
While we are at it, let's put red light cams on every intersection with a red light.
And speeding cams on every road--especially highways.
Hey, you dig into the statistics and the percentage of people running red lights and/or speeding is greater then the percentage of police abusing their power.
Hell on some highways I've driven, everyone is doing at least 10 mph over the speed limit.
Hey turnabout is fair play
Think a bit more... just the management costs alone for the departments (city/county governments) - storage, cloud storage? Oops some embarrassing but unrelated to a prosecution information gets out to the public. Maybe you acting a fool after a night out, but just told to go home with your friends lands on youtube and you boss sees it. How does the department store, classify, retain and secure the media? Let's hire someone? no outsource it.... any way it's handled costs $$
Hmmm FOIA requests, ok redact the images of the unrelated persons, children, how much media to provide. Let's see we'll need an editing center, equipment.... and people. Say for a small department with 10 officers that's 10 hours of footage a day, oops got to cut out the time spent in the bathroom stall, so maybe 9.5 hours times a 48 hour week times 50 weeks that's only a small amount of media to deal with... other issues around filming constantly... you bet.
Yeah this is all so simple and a win-win. Consider a bit deeper than a simple few quick thoughts.
Just have it required. The cop can easily check, and they usually go in mob handed and with dashcams too. So there's no reason to suppose that all 8 cams went offline so disasterously for the proof of police innocence.
And the cops can stop bloody demanding that they stop being filmed too. If they're worried that the images will be edited because they're out of police control (which is also why you shouldn't trust just the police cams: the police are public people too), they can be safe that their cam will catch the "real truth".
While I see the necessity of more oversight I'm concerned of this spilling over into other jobs. I would for instance be uncomfortable in my career (as a high end, male, escort for lonely super models and *definitely* nothing involving beating on databases all day) to have people analyze and review my every word and move.
Unless of course a mandatory "Yakety Sax" soundtrack combined with a 2x speed increase became the standard for all body cam video.
Who made them "high-profile"? Why, the Jewish media, which wants to allow non-whites to commit endless crimes against unarmed white people...
Personally the Police I have talked too want them. They can help replay conflicts and identify many people that a police officer may only have time to get a quick look to identify a suspect. It also documents assault and a person demeanor with police. It makes a police officers job a whole lot easier to be able to have solid evidence in video then relying on witnesses. The people that should be afraid are the ones who like to challenge authority and claim police brutality. Its just like those who hate any kind of public camera. They are not worried about privacy, they just do not want to be caught doing something wrong.
No doubt the camera's on police help eliminate the gray area of physical contact with subjects. Its going to help both ways in weeding out bad cops, and putting away bad people.
I work for a police agency that currently uses dash cameras and is researching body cameras.
There is a great deal of bullshit on this post. While every libertarian neck beard swears up and down that cops are all deleting video as fast as they can, we see the opposite. These aren't just some commodity cameras that the officer has to pop the SD card out of and then copy the files to his desktop. Camera's are activated automatically for most events and are coded to detect alteration. The only interaction the officer has with the end product is tagging. The evidence tag placed on the video determines the retention policy and even un-tagged video is held much longer than necessary. The problem we face is officers tagging EVERYTHING as permanent save.
You see it as policing the cops, the cops see it as CYA. I also work in a state where the DA will refuse to prosecute many crimes if there isn't video. The cops WANT more video; not less.
*ducks*
The problem is that the public may not have access. In many places, the video is only accessible by the police.
Even on traffic stops, they are worried that the driver could easily be waiting with a gun in their hand. They do not trust anyone.
I think it's more a statement on society in general. Anyone can be armed and everyone is considered a potential threat.
'Murica, fuck yeah!! 2A all the way, baby!!!1! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
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Since the evidence may be for or against the police, the video should not be collected and archived by the police.
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Otherwise there is always the possibility that video which puts the police in a bad light may have gaps in coverage, or the audio may disappear, or the video itself may be "lost".
Being glib, but every time the media reports some problem with the police (over hear at any rate), they release a statement, then a week later, it turns out that the police lied to try to save their own skins.
That is called selection bias.
The body camera can show what actually happened, at least from one perspective at least, and that's good. I think all cops should wear them, subject to developing reasonable rules for privacy etc. But they can't show you what the officer thinks is happening, or the contextual information that led him to that. Those things are critical to judging whether the cop's actions are justifiable or criminal. A cop can shoot an innocent person because of bad information. Likewise a cop can shoot someone where the circumstances justify it, but without knowing that. In that case it's likely nothing will be done on the "no harm, no foul" theory, but you'd still have a rogue cop running around.
Take the case of the shooting of John Crawford III, who was gunned down by a police team in a Walmart. When this happens we get dueling, simplistic narratives: if Crawford was shot it must have been because he was a thug... Or, if you prefer, he was shot because the cops are evil racists. When the video came out the discrepancies between the police accounts and what you could see for yourself strengthened the left wing construction of the scenario: the police are evil, lying racists. Without denying the existence of racist, lying cops, this interpretation of events doesn't explain why the cops would want to shoot a harmless stranger in the first place. Yes, you can't rule out utter depravity, but if you consider all the circumstances the more likely explanation is that they were primed to expect an active shooter. Recent science can explain pretty well how someone can perceive what he expects to perceive, although of course explanation is not the same as proof. What an explanation should do is raise doubts about interpretation.
The Walmart videos essentially show the cops showing up and shooting Crawford immediately; there is no time for any of the things the police report happening to happen. Lying is the obvious explanation, but this could also be the product of a phenomenon many people have experienced personally: the brain's subjective experience of time is highly elastic. When you think you are in danger things seem to move in slow motion. That can interact with another, long-known physiological fact about visual perception. Look at your thumbnail at arm's length; that's roughly the area of the fovea centralis, which covers less than 1% of the area of your visual field, but accounts for about 50% of the information your brain receives. A few degrees to either side of that area and you can't tell the difference between a man and a woman, an adult and a child, or zucchini and a hand gun. But you don't experience looking at the world through a narrow tube, you experience it in super-widescreen high definition. That high def picture doesn't actually exist, it's constructed by your brain as your eye flits around the scene -- a fact exploited by magicians to create illusions. When your sense of time slows down, the picture doesn't go blurry; you still get the super-widescreen high def picture, but most of it consists of what you expect to be there. I expect this is what happened in the shooting of Tamir Rice. The officers perceived an adult male with a real gun, and perceived themselves having plenty of time for a good look, and were mistaken in every respect.
Controversial videos often tend to discount the ready-made "blacks are thugs" explanation, although sometimes we may be missing some key context. But what about the "cops are racists" explanation? Well, there's no doubt the police have their share of racist psychopaths, but the problem with jumping to that conclusion is that when you're wrong you end up leaving the underlying problem in place. That includes institutional racism, which by definition is impersonal. The problem stop-and-frisk, arrest quotas, and other attempts to employ police as behavioral control agents is that they lead to conflict and hostility becoming the routine mo
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Lets have a flash mob of people trying to record ever interaction with police. All it would take is a small scuffle to change a traffic stop into a mob scene.
If "Big Brother" is the state monitoring the citizens for evidence of misconduct, could the citizens' ability to monitor the state actors for evidence of misconduct be referred to as "Little Brother"?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
This is great and all, but I'm waiting for the Age of Law Enforcement Accountability, where cases against police officers for excessive force resulting in death or gross injury no longer go through a grand jury and instead proceed straight to a jury trial. Until the District Attorneys stop fighting on behalf of the police to get them off in cases that clearly constitute murder, body cams are progress but not a solution.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
We can all expect a lot of sudden EMP-like interference that wipes out the most important parts of the cop *and* citizens' cam recordings.
Not that it will have _anything_ to do with the little black box in the cops' other pocket.
Wake me up when cops actually face consequences for abuse of power and misuse of force.
What's going to happen is we'll see bodycam footage used to exonerate cops when they record people attacking them, but in cases where cops abused their authority, the bodycam footage will not be made available even in court.
This technology only exists for the benefit of the police gang of the United States. From my first-hand experience in AZ, here are the 2 big things wrong with it:
1. The cams are easily switched on or off via a toggle button and there are no repercussions for disabling the cam at key moments
2. The footage is stored locally, never sees cloud storage or any sort of formal oversight.
3. Footage requests are sent directly to the officer. He/she may choose to not answer his/her email in a timely fashion, or redact/suppress some of the footage. There is NO oversight or accountability.
I have first-hand witnessed this. It is a very eye-opening experience to see a prosecutor help a police officer suppress footage.
Story:
Not too long ago, I pulled into a parking spot next to a police officer and my right tire chirped. As I exited my vehicle, my eyes focused on the receiving-end of a young police officer's Glock. After he arrested me on charges of reckless driving, read me my Miranda rights and tossed me in his car, he spoke with his buddies who had arrived. They try to question me (apparently unaware I was read my rights, unconstitutional), and then they decide to search my vehicle. They find an unloaded revolver and no bullets, and tack on a charge for posession of a deadly weapon, failure to admit.
On the arrest report, the officer states that "the entire encounter was captured on film". Fast forward 3 months, my attorney has only received 45 seconds of footage, the part where the officer has his weapon drawn (but not before; I wonder how the officer turned on the camera with 2 hands on his weapon? oh wait, it was already on). In email, the police officer claims this is all of the footage. My attorney thinks there is more. 3 months later, after 6 more requests, a rather impatient prosecutor threatens repercussions for spoliation of evidence. Another 2 minutes 30 seconds shows up in the LE Dropbox. This snippet has redacted audio. A legal document, signed by the prosecutor, stating that the officer did not capture any other footage, arrives in my attorney's email.
The encounter was 10 minutes in duration. The first video is with the Glock raised. The second video begins after I am in the cop car, doesn't capture any of our conversation or the vehicle search. Was this excessive use of deadly force? Maybe. Did I deserve a reckless driving charge? Maybe. Was questioning me about my vehicle after I was read my rights unconstitutional? Yes.
The only time we see "leaked" bodycam video is when somebody dies. Officers are still free to abuse the system, as long as they don't pull the trigger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
to make it so that cops get to write their reports AFTER viewing the cam footage. This is unacceptable, and indicative of the rampant police corruption in the USA.
Cams are not a cure-all, not even close. Cops will just turn them off or block them as needed; they are currently using them as an excuse to collect outrageous amounts of funds from poor people by using the excuse that they "no longer have discretion".
There is a war going on in this country, and the local PD's are part of that war on the poor. The problem is systemic and involves the DA's and prosecutors and dirty judges, and people that profit from the prison system itself.
The USA has a greater percentage of it's population in jails and prisons than ANY other nation; we are the harassment of the world. And none of us are any safer as a result.