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

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#201

Post by mulmen » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 1:50 AM UTC

s73ver_ wrote: post #103

yojex wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an agent of the state commits a "horrific, abhorrent affront" against you, you want it to be kept secret? That's what I'm reading here.

That would be a fair interpretation if that's all they did. However, we all know that law enforcement agents do lots of other things that the people involved would rather not be made public. A cop being a first responder to someone having a seizure, or consoling a rape victim, are things that I'm pretty sure those people would not want to be public.

Ok but in that case the state did not commit an abhorrent act.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#202

Post by clouddrover » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 1:56 AM UTC

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…

> The DC/Baltimore area has had some recent high profile falsification of evidence accidentally caught on camera cases.

Such as this one:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/body-camera-video-alleg...

They were only caught out because they forgot that the 30 seconds prior to turning the camera "on" would be included in the video.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#203

Post by YokoZar » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

zzalpha wrote: post #36

whack wrote: post #6

Before people start wildly speculating, it's worth considering the many good explanations and interpretations suggested in the article: One hypothesis is that officers got used to the cameras and became desensitized to them. But the researchers saw no difference in behavior during the initial phase, when the cameras were new. (The researchers also checked the data to make sure officers were turning their cameras on w…

Funny, I noticed an absence of a far more cynical explanation that made me immediately doubt how balanced the article was: if cops know that the footage is difficult to obtain or can be easily suppressed, deleted, or otherwise buried, or if the legal system is already heavily biased in favour of law enforcement such that body cam footage rarely changes trial outcomes, then body cams don't actually contribute to addit…

Also, if you can turn off your body cam (or fail to turn it on), then you are free to behave however you want as though you weren't on camera.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#204

Post by dreamache » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:02 AM UTC

will_brown wrote: post #60

I was recently the victim of an armed kidnapping, escaping only by jumping out of my own car from the driver seat while in gear with the gunman in the passenger seat. By the time the police arrived, my attacker escaped in my car and the first words out of the sergeants mouth was “cut the crap, quit jerking us around, what really happened?” Sure enough I was in a jurisdiction that only two months prior was equipped wi…

Automatically upload footage to something like the IPFS. Blockchain that shit, immutable.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#205

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:07 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #175

jamesw6811 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pretty big difference in your two examples. Models of bosons behave in a predictable way. I can think of several likely reasons that reports of use-of-force incidents would not correlate directly with actual use-of-force. As a result, in a study or a journalistic write-up of said study, I wouldn't jump to the shorthand of "tracked use-of-force incidents" as opposed to "reports of use-of-force incidents". J…

I think the examples track pretty well. You could say that body cameras somehow cause a rise and reporting that exactly offsets the reduction in violence, but that’s not even wild conjecture. It’s worse. It’s inventing factors to make the data fit, factors that are by definition not measurable. Whatever we measure, it’s possible to invent a factor that makes the measurement completely wrong. Scientists could similarl…

Measure what you can measure. Claim what you can claim. Don't claim what you can't claim based on what you measured. We're not talking about counting photons here. We're talking about human selective self-reporting under different circumstances. Understand the chasm between those things.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#206

Post by comicjk » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:09 AM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #185

comicjk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems obvious to me, but maybe it isn't based on the implementations of body cameras I'm hearing about: the police should not have access to the videos! A camera should automatically upload its contents to off-site encrypted servers, with the courts having sole access to the decryption keys. No one should be able to access the data without a court order. It's strange to me that, when faced with problems of offic…

Why shouldn't the public have access at least to the videos filmed in public?

Practically, that would require court-sanctioned employees to go through all the videos and edit out the non-public content before release (automation probably doesn't cut it legally). It would require a significant labor force and cost, substantially reduce the overall privacy of the system, and occasionally release private info by mistake. I'm not opposed to it in principle, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#207

Post by Anechoic » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:12 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #95

Anechoic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience? Certainly my own experience with police has shaped my views far more than anything I've seen in the news.

> > I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. > Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience? Probably also a factor, but that's also not representative and subject to perceptual biases.

>but that's also not representative

One occurrence possibly. When it happens multiple times, I'm not inclined to attribute it to perceptual biases.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#208

Post by busted » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

This article is kind of absurd in its assumption, I think it's irresponsible. By saying that you thought police would modify their behavior in response to being filmed, and especially (but not only) by citing a bunch of studies where CRIMINALS changed their behavior in response to being filmed, you are implying that the officers would change their behavior because THEY KNOW THEIR BEHAVIOR IS WRONG and they were doing it anyway. You're essentially saying you are surprised more officers are not actively criminals.

The actual problem is more likely that in the vast majority of incidents officers DO NOT KNOW what they're doing is wrong, that for instance they're acting with bias or unreasonably against someone of color in a way they wouldn't act against a white person. The ACTUAL purpose of the body cameras is to create a record that allows ACCOUNTABILITY for officers ("I felt threatened" with no evidence is no longer enough to justify a shooting). Only with that accountability can we start to PROVE that officers are acting unfairly whether they consciously intend to or not, and then fix the problem (with "training" as the article says but with no detail may as well have been saying nothing).

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#209

Post by throwaway000025 » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #87

will_brown wrote: post #60

I was recently the victim of an armed kidnapping, escaping only by jumping out of my own car from the driver seat while in gear with the gunman in the passenger seat. By the time the police arrived, my attacker escaped in my car and the first words out of the sergeants mouth was “cut the crap, quit jerking us around, what really happened?” Sure enough I was in a jurisdiction that only two months prior was equipped wi…

Fixing this will have to be the next step. The first step was getting the body cams. Also, you could probably file a suit to get the unredacted video, and you could make a big stink about this. That's how you get to the next step.

The body cams need to serialize their stream to a special satellite or cell provider, and a chain of auditable custody needs to be preserved at multiple data centers. Police cannot be the masters of their own footage. It needs to exist beyond bribery, lust and international intimidation. It needs to be out of their hands and into a web of trust, as soon as the photons hit the sensors.

Then it comes down to jamming, tampering, malfunction, sabotage, and any misbehavior that otherwise prevents useful recordings, since we’re talking about wearables that can be covered, discarded and left behind, even if thy can’t be turned off. But if it does get recorded, it needs to get locked up tighter than handcuffs.

That video needs to dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Re: A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

#210

Post by comex » Sat, Oct 21, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

dibujante wrote: post #111

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You don’t actually need a control to make claims about what fraction of police officers are “decent people”. Even if, hypothetically, decency were determined completely by external factors that happen to correlate with being a police officer, that wouldn’t change the fact that any police officer you meet is likely to be less (or more) decent than some baseline of people in general.

Though, of course, the source itself may be making stronger claims…