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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.
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.
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's not just to curtail abuses of power either, but to protect good cops who take the appropriate actions but afterwards are second-guessed and told they acted inappropriately. Instead of just having "they say this/the officer says that", we can have a video released showing the entire encounter. That video can either exonerate the officer (stopping huge protests or calls for his arrest) or provide evidence if he did do something wrong. Either way, more transparency is a good thing for everyone involved.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
with police officers wearing cameras, they implicitly control the narrative. They know that they are wearing cameras, and will always be much more familiar than the average citizen with their capabilities and limitations. If a police officer sees what they interpret as an action warranting an escalation of force, they can ensure that this is captured, and (without being malicious) can ensure that it is captured in a way which most-"accurately" depicts their interpretation of the situation.
Ensuring that other citizens have the right to show things "from their perspective" is key. And honestly, it would be completely absurd to say to anyone, in any situation at all, something which translates to: you are allowed to open your eyes, but you are not allowed to remember what you see.
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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.
Storing years of video data is trivially easy if you know what you are doing and not wildly costly. Most of this is never going to be looked at, so HSM with say 1PB of active disk and as large a library as you care should (100PB would be trivial) do the trick. Replicate over a couple of sites. Push everything over say six months old to tape, expire anything over 10 years old unless flagged in advance. One could easily do that for 20million USD, excluding the cost of the data centres. We are talking say 2 racks for the disk storage and servers and however much space you wish to donate to the tape libraries.
I am not sure what the physical foot print of a fully tricked out IBM TS3500 tape library is but their web page tells me that max capacity is 2.25 Exabytes, mix in some TSM and GPFS (or Spectrum Scale as they call it now) and jobs a good one.
Large scale storage is only a problem for those that don't know what they are doing.
Camera battery only has to last a shift.... and, as I mentioned, the data should be relayed to other servers for storage. I do not think it's as burdensome as you suggest. Small, portable, wearable tech... the officer could even have multiple units. Also, the footage does not need to be kept indefinitely, and only clips are required if there is an incident. I think if a cop does not report something, and nobody comes by for some time to report them for something, the space can be reclaimed. But the data should be public, and if some private entity wants to store it all in perpetuity, that'd be their own choice.
I could accept the cameras not always being on - but then I'd defer to the citizens in cases where the officer failed to turn it on.
As for what is a legitimate malfunction, that can be tricky. If the video is streamed to the patrol car and instantly relayed back to other storage, then a criminal wouldn't be able to break the camera without the footage being seen. I could see where, otherwise, a criminal could shoot a cop and then break the camera. I wouldn't want something like that happening. But otherwise, obviously, the receiver in the vehicle could warn the officer that there's no signal.
As for how much I'm willing to pay - the fact is we pay more than enough to do this. You'd probably disagree with me, but I can guarantee I could find enough taxes to cut to pay for this. The alternative is an escalation in claims against police - also costing millions in taxpayer dollars, even if the officer is found innocent and there's no payout.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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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It's happened already. Not, admittedly, frequently. But most people refrain from obviously filming police.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Both sides can be filming and it not stop a shooting, too. Here is a video where the officer had a body camera and the teen had a cell phone recording. It didn't stop the officer from shooting him: https://youtu.be/h-uXeAvpVHk
Neither version helped convict the officer, either. It was ruled justified. I lean heavily in favor of the teen, but I can see the officer spin it enough to make it sound like a legit shooting. The poor kid should have sucked it up more and did what the officer said. But still, in the same situation, I would not have shot the teen. The officer called for backup, but did not wait.
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