A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations • Hacker News Board

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#61

Post by lostlogin » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #53

MSM wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace talking about a rape with any of many reasons the police might be called and it makes just as little sense to have all these videos public. Super innocent example: A 14 year old kid breaks their leg and the cops show up to them in agony and crying. Would be very easy for a few people that dislike them to plaster them crying all over social media. Yes, the event was public to begin with, but the chances of one…

> Super innocent example: A 14 year old kid breaks their leg and the cops show up to them in agony and crying. This seems like the same argument. What does enforcement of the laws have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated these two things? I assert that the state has an interest in injecting law enforcement concepts in all sorts of situation precisely because it opens up uncertainty over its public n…

Police are people who are trained to deal with stress, qualified to take witness statements (which insurance often requires), have a level of medical knowledge, can get places fast and can get more help (and possibly better qualified help) quick. Why wouldn’t you want them there?

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#62

Post by jMyles » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #56

jMyles wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a compelling argument. What is the connection between enforcement of statutory code and medical aid / emergency response? Why do these social services need to be delivered by LEOs? At my college, one of the best things my student government did was first response in cases of rape and sexual assault. We had a phone number that people were able to call and get a response from a peer who had been t…

You don’t want police involvement in rapes? Edit: nice, you edit the parent and don’t note it.

Have you been involved in responding to rape and sexual assault? I have.

There are worlds of difference between jurisdictions in this regard. And also substantial differences in the specifics of a case.

In the (rare) case of a rapist jumping out of the bushes and tackling someone, and then running away in hot pursuit, then sure, a law-enforcement-first response makes sense.

In the far more frequent date rape / party rape situation, where the victim is left to piece together the episode the next morning, then no, I think that there are far, far better responses than LEO-first.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#63

Post by s73ver_ » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #47

taeric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trivial to argue against, though. Officer heads to restroom to help patient that is having seizures. Heck, officer heads anywhere to help citizen having seizures. (Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.) Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.

The underlying question here is: what does enforcement of the public ordinances have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated those? Why has our society conflated law enforcement with emergency response at all? What do these two things have to do with each other? That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem…

Police often have training in first aid. In addition, they might be much closer than an ambulance, so might be sent to help out in that case. It's not a problem in the least.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#64

Post by oh_sigh » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

ddlatham wrote: post #2

Besides the overall result, another fact that surprised me: The devices vary in price, but the biggest expense is the data-storage cost. In Washington, M.P.D. officers collect about a thousand hours of footage a day. About 40 percent of it is deleted within 90 days, while the rest is to be kept for months, years or decades, depending on the statute of limitations for the charges connected to the footage.

This sounds like a good use case for cold storage like AWS glacier. If you assume 1000 hours of footage would be ~600GB, 1 day of footage would cost ~2.4 cents per month on glacier until you go to retrieve it. Or, 75 cents per month for each month of footage. Most footage would never be watched and eventually purged.

I'm not sure how chain of custody would work...perhaps digitally signing the uploads and keeping those signature records locally at the station. But the USG uses AWS, so I'm sure some solution could be found.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#65

Post by avn2109 » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #18

jandrese wrote: post #3

It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Police officers are almost entirely decent people that shouldn't feel the need to change their behavior just because they're being recorded. Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much. I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. Counte…

This explains too much, since there have been other depts that did see a likely effect (like Rialto). I found this part more compelling: > Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per r…

It's blindingly obvious (to me) that the cops are just disabling the cameras before doing controversial things. I find it extremely surprising that nobody else seems to believe this theory.

As another commented pointed out downthread, you can hear them on accidentally-recorded video saying things like "We're still red here! Be careful!" when planting evidence/stealing stuff/whatever.

Disclaimer: I think both street protesters/identity politics activists and the police are basically run by assholes.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#66

Post by alasdair_ » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:12 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #57

givinguflac wrote: post #4

Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.

No thanks. Now anyone with a minor budget can run every single police video through image recognition and get a whole lot of private info on folks you likely don't want getting out. Happen to be at a party that was broken up due to noise complaints? Drugs were found there? Why were you caught on camera leaving the house when officers arrived? Sounds like you are a liability! If this actually happened I would give it…

I feel the same way about 911 calls - it should require explicit consent of the person calling for those calls to be released outside of court.

Having people re-victimized by turning their pleas for help into entertainment is bullshit.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#67

Post by lostlogin » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:13 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #62

lostlogin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t want police involvement in rapes? Edit: nice, you edit the parent and don’t note it.

Have you been involved in responding to rape and sexual assault? I have. There are worlds of difference between jurisdictions in this regard. And also substantial differences in the specifics of a case. In the (rare) case of a rapist jumping out of the bushes and tackling someone, and then running away in hot pursuit, then sure, a law-enforcement-first response makes sense. In the far more frequent date rape / party…

What a great game of ‘one up’ to play.

Maybe the victim should call whoever they want. Like they can now.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#68

Post by givinguflac » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

eric_h wrote: post #8

givinguflac wrote: post #4

Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.

There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly. It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.

I’m not saying it should be live streamed to YouTube, just for incidents that are resolved or public, and need long term storage. Obviously there would need to be some editing, ideally by an independent team.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#69

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:44 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #51

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #41

> Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. If you hypothetically have fewer incidents and simultaneously higher percentage reporting of incidents when people are able to see if there's probable evidence supporting their complaints (i.e. the visible presence of a body camera), you could end up w…

> This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. This is unfair. You're complaining that they didn't do something that you admit is impossible. They measured essentially everything they could.

I'm not upset about what they measured. I'm upset about what they claim they learned from it and about the kinds of causation-related lemmata they (erroneously) assert in the report.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#70

Post by eric_h » Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

s73ver_ wrote: post #55

irrational wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they don't know. I had a coworker who was recently arrested for child porn. Despite knowing and working with him for years there was no indication that he wasn't "squeaky clean".

But we're talking about incidents that are public. When Eric Garner was choked to death by police, I don't recall hearing a lot of cops call for those detectives to be fired. Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him. These are not "decent people".

> Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him.

> These are not "decent people".

I really don't think it's that clear cut. The cops who turned their backs aren't all, necessarily, bad people. The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.

They respond to perceived attacks on interests in a similar way to what many subcultures do when they feel their interests are being encroached upon; they protest and grow more insular in solidarity.

This tends to lead to a bubble and allows otherwise decent people to, inadvertently or otherwise, overlook the shortcomings of "a few bad apples", in the interest of protecting people who they think have their best interests at heart.

I'm not saying this is good, it's just important to remember that cops are humans and behave like humans. Training is supposed to reduce the incidence of human misbehavior but I think that even just the fact that police wear uniforms tends to make them take the side of the "team" that they're representing.