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Body Camera Study Shows No Effect On Police Use of Force Or Citizen Complaints (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers' use of force, at least in the nation's capital. That's the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts. In the wake of high-profile shootings, many police departments have been rapidly adopting body-worn cameras, despite a dearth of solid research on how the technology can change policing. "We need science, rather than our speculations about it, to try to answer and understand what impacts the cameras are having," says David Yokum, director of the Lab @ DC. His group worked with local police officials to make sure that cameras were handed out in a way that let the researchers carefully compare officers who were randomly assigned to get cameras with those who were not. The study ran from June 2015 to last December. It's to be expected that these cameras might have little impact on the behavior of police officers in Washington, D.C., he says, because this particular force went through about a decade of federal oversight to help improve the department.
Because police officers will happily turn off the cameras whenever they know they'll get in situations where they'll look bad. And given that there are no consequences for doing so, this will continue to be the status quo.
Crime Privacy Police Complaints Drop 93 Percent After Deploying Body Cameras https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Fuck you. Privatized police would be incentivized to do whatever maximized profit, which is likely increased incarceration when the prison system is privatized but publicly funded. Privatize the funding of prisons then maybe.
The point, as I understood it, is that we have footage that shows what really happened, as opposed to when cops lie about the mortal danger of a black person running away from them,
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
To be useful, they need to do a study where police misconduct is rampant.
No, they just need a study where they can prove that all footage was recorded and processed. Can they turn off cameras?
What was the percentage of damaged recording (audio or video)?
Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show
When this country was founded there were only private 'police' forces. You could hire a night watchmen, or a locality might pay for one. It's one of the reasons for our adversarial justice system: the idea is not that the government was tracking down evildoers, but that you personally would go to a magistrate with sworn evidence, obtain a warrant, and if necessary obtain the bunch of thugs necessary to arrest the person who wronged you (dueling was also an accepted alternative). It does have a certain libertarian appeal to it, but as law enforcement is a service which is required to be universal, [1] privatizing it amounts to a private tax, and [2] it's less efficient. Police forces were introduced originally (in London, by one Robert Peel, from whence they derived the nickname 'bobbies') as a cost-saving measure.
Anyone wishing to return to the days of private police is an idiot, an anarchist, or more frequently both.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's what I don't get about this conspiracy theory of a private police and prison industry putting people in prison to make money. Everyone in prison must have a trial, often before a jury. If people want to see this system short circuited then demand everyone be put before a jury. Even if there is a claim of a judge being paid off then the jury should stop this short.
I have a couple of questions for you.
1. Which country has the largest proportion of private prisons?
2. Which country puts most more of its citizens in prison than any other country?
If your answer is "USA" then congratulations you win. You are about 7 times as likely to be thrown in gaol in the land of the free than in China.
There are many wonderful things about America (like e.g. NM) but your justice system isn't one of them. And until you collectively stop believing you're the best at everything and look at the cold hard facts it will not improve.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
China is a prison. Their prison population is over one billion.
No it isn't and no it isn't. While you keep denying the facts, things will never improve.
I'm not going to say that the USA is perfect, it's obviously not. Comparing the USA to China just does not follow.
Kind of the point though. Lots of people here hold up China as "the big evil" and yet you're still much, much more likely to be thrown in prison in America.
Look: your country has the highest proportion of incarceration in the world. You can pick literally any other country for comparison and you'll look worse in this regard. Feel free to go through the other 147 and rationalise as to why the US is perfectly fine having such a higher incarceration rate.
I'll take my "wonderful things" about America over the "justice system" that China offers.
That's the problem, you're so obsessed with what everyone else is doing wrong that you can't see the wood from the trees.
They'll shoot people that speak out against the government. The government has developed a habit recently of destroying houses of worship. There are suspicions that they've done this with people still inside. There's no bill of rights there. There's no trial by jury. There's no elections, except those where the Communist candidate always wins.
Exactly! They do all those things and yet the USA still manages to imprison 7 times as many people! That's fucked up.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If 'bad behavior' is only attributable to a small percentage of cops to begin with, then you would expect little change on average from using cameras.
And, you know, that's fine. If cameras don't deter bad behavior, so be it. But in that case, FFS, use the footage, both against criminals who otherwise benefit from the ambiguity the lack of footage would bring, and against bad cops.
Cameras aren't just about deterring bad behavior, they're also about being able to reliably deal with he said/she said situations where there are severe consequences for believing one party over the other.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
People seem to ignore the fact that a decade of oversight actually creates an organizational culture where doing shit that makes the whole force look bad isn't tolerated.
In cities where oversight is lax, you end up with an organizational culture that works to sweep things under the rug, stonewall journalists trying to find information about incidents, etc. The community stops trusting the police force to protect them because it isn't.
Threads like this are why I read comments first, article second. I come here because there is always a good chance someone has already debunked or analyzed the article before me. Good job, thanks.
God, you're dense. I'll put his point into plain language for you: YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE IMPRISONED IN AMERICA BECAUSE YOU ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE SHOT ON THE SPOT. Is that clear enough for you?
"They'll shoot people that speak out against the government. The government has developed a habit recently of destroying houses of worship. There are suspicions that they've done this with people still inside. There's no bill of rights there. There's no trial by jury. There's no elections, except those where the Communist candidate always wins.
Exactly! They do all those things and yet the USA still manages to imprison 7 times as many people! That's fucked up."
Lol, you're an evil fuck. I'll reiterate the point: The USA manages to imprison more people than China because it doesn't immediately kill every accused person under arrest, or make them disappear. Get yourself checked.
Yes. Footage like that will save many cities and counties and states a LOT of previously wasted civil suit cash, because instead of it being one person's word against another, the cops have a better chance of showing exactly how dangerous their encounters frequently are. Jurors who get to actually SEE how decisions to use force must be made more or less instantaneously will usually rethink their expectation that police can somehow time travel and take actions that normal human beings can't.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.