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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.
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.
If they are equipped with a camera, and it's not legitimately malfunctioning, then they should automatically be assumed to be at fault if the camera is off during a confrontation.
Honestly, these body camera should not even have an off switch, they should stream to a server in the officers vehicle, and instantly be streamed to other storage - at least one not controlled by the police department. They should also be required to return to the station and get a replacement if their camera is malfunctioning.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Forget the no knock raid here. People were quick to point at how bad the cameras everywhere policies were in some other countries... The US has a lot of cops. if they all have always on cameras and are just walking around in public...the state now has cameras everywhere. Congratz.
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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