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A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

nytimes.com

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Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#111

Post by dibujante »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #82
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…

>Police officers are almost entirely decent people . . . This statement requires justification. >Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population. >As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic…

Um, this study isn't controlling for socioeconomic status?

It sort of barely controls for age, which finds lower violence when the officers are older.

But it's not very convincing. Anecdotally it seems like there is a domestic violence problem in the population, but you can't compare it to the general population. You need to control for education, background, and socioeconomic status.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#112

Post by KGIII »

FireBeyond wrote: post #108
KGIII wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an officer of the court myself ... Could you elaborate on that? I have some thoughts but want to know if my thoughts are really valid. What type of court officer are you? Is it in the same jurisdiction? Things like that. I don't want to prejudice your responses. (I should also mention that my thoughts aren't going to put any blame on you.)

My thoughts here would be "is an attorney".

Mine was prosecuting attorney. I don't think defense attorneys are considered officers of the court, but I'm not sure and it may vary by jurisdiction.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#113

Post by rhizome »

eric_h wrote: post #70
s73ver_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You should sprinkle some more "I think" and "I believe" and "I'm under the impression" when stating your opinions, because none of what you say is anything more than speculation and just-so stories.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#114

Post by Clubber »

pzxc wrote: post #29
losvedir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams. That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he sai…

I think maybe it was downvoted because it misses the point, just as the article misses the point. Behavior change would be nice but the real benefit here is accountability. So what if there were 1.6% (made up number) rate of reported bad behaviors, and now the rate is still 1.6% -- the point is that in those 1.6% of cases, there is now the best kind of evidence to ensure that the facts are represented accurately when…

Yes, this is the real benefit. It's no longer the police's word against the defendant, which nearly always goes the way of the police in a court of law.

Accountability is key.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#115

Post by Coincoin »

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…

> What do these two things have to do with each other?

They are both emergency responses and require tremendous amount of material and human resources to get there very fast.

Police have the fastest cars with the brightest lights that let them go wherever they want the fastest (Bonus if they have a motorcycle, but those they keep to give speeding tickets for some reason). It also means they are the first ones there and might need to do CPR from time to time or help that guy about to jump down the bridge.

>Why has our society conflated those?

We are imperfect humans in an imperfect world. We can't assign every single task to a different human being. We, as a society, accept that.

>The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.

There is a big difference between secrecy of the police and privacy of the policed.

Go watch Live PD and come tell me seriously they should stop censoring the names, date of birth, addresses, plate numbers, SSN, wardrobe malfunctions of the victims, witnesses and children that appear in the show.

They take the time to protect the privacy of the bystanders, but it costs money and an incredible amount of resource to do so just for a couple of teams for a couple of hours a week and they don't even do a perfect job.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#116

Post by floatingatoll »

Is the Washington DC police district known to be relatively free of the corruption that plagues e.g. Oakland and Chicago? It's possible they measured a district that's already "constantly under observation", and thus detected no significant behavioral shifts.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#117

Post by Clubber »

fredophile wrote: post #50
dsr_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only millions? No problem at all. Let's revise that estimate, though. 765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million. At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year. Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing…

$1000 is way too high. I bought a helmet cam in 2009 that was designed for military applications (fairly robust, easy to change AA batteries) and it cost about $300-400 back then. Looking for fairly robust cameras I can see that the action camera in Olympus Tough lineup is currently selling for $350. I've seen other cameras in this product line take a good beating and come out fine. Obviously there would be additiona…

About $450 a pop with dock. Storage is expensive though. Cameras on all times and retention for 90 days is what this particular department had.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-09-24/police-wei...

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#118

Post by gowld »

theptip wrote: post #5

TL;DR: Previous sociology research had suggested that filming people makes them more civil. New research on fails to replicate this result in the context of police body cameras. Doesn't seem like a very interesting result to me; I hadn't previously heard of the "calming effect" as a reason to use body cameras. The primary reason to use cameras is to increase accountability, so that police officers are less able to ge…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#119

Post by OrwellianChild »

coffee9 wrote: post #20
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…

I assumed the point of body cameras was simply for physical evidence after an incident, that cops might "behave" better due to some psychological effect doesn't strike me as important.

Agreed. I thought that any "nudge" factor was secondary to getting reliable reporting at the scene rather than relying upon corruptible testimony by officers after-the-fact. All the problems stated elsewhere in this thread around discretion in deactivating cameras still exist and need to be addressed.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#120

Post by rocqua »

vladislav wrote: post #37

1) The feedback loop is not just being filmed on the job, but the repercussions of being filmed while doing something illegal and being punished for it. It might take time for this to sink in, especially for the bad apples. 2) Having body cams on all police officers simply makes sense, regardless of the immediate effect. Knowing exactly (or more about) what happened when a citizen armed on behalf of the state interac…

There is a decent privacy argument to be made against body cams. Not just for the officers themselves, but also for the people approached by the officers. In many cases, when police need to get involved people aren't showing their best sides. Recordings of that kind of stuff are rather sensitive.

You gotta remember that body cams can't just be used against corrupt police, they can just as easily be used against the public. Consider how a closeted gay person reacts when caught drunk with a boyfriend and how the presence of a camera effects that.

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