241–250 of 353 posts
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It would be illegal otherwise, wouldn't it? Redaction of evidence
You would have to prove a) that it was evidence of a crime, and b) the police had reason to believe or know it was such. In the absence of laws requiring full transparency and access to body cam footage, the body cams are just likely to be abused.
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Exactly, being rude and blunt right away is probably about the most efficient thing they can do. I bet 70% of the time people change their stories when confronted with that line.
I couldn't disagree more. The police are there to gather evidence. They're effectively tainting evidence if they mistreat people or ask leading questions or the like. You'd better believe it matters when they come after you for (say) making false statements to the police, and it's their word against yours, and the court always sides with the cops.
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.
Depends really. Moving to a different country would be my next step personally.
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We just need to establish a legal precept that if the body cam footage isn't there to corroborate the cops' story, we assume the worst and they get held accountable for anything a plaintiff is able to plausibly allege. Under that scenario, most cops would become the biggest advocates for e.g., redundancies, backups and transparency.
This seems to abolish the right to be "innocent until proven guilty". It's always possible to allege a crime that no one can prove didn't happen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot ), so without a presumption of innocence, the system essentially puts the accused at the mercy of the accuser.
There would still be lots of details to get right, but at least it wouldn't violate the basic underlying principles of our legal system.
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How about firing anyone who tampers with the evidence? And I mean actually let them go, not give them indefinite paid vacation.
My local PD recently sent a guy home for 10 days WITHOUT pay for merely getting mad at his son's football game and throwing a helmet. It was unbecoming of their professional standards (even off-duty) and he's representing the community. It even made the news (how I heard about it). So remember, there are plenty of good cops and good forces out there. It's just the shit ones never get held accountable.
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…
You're a real life action hero for escaping a gun man in a moving vehicle!
> 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.
What if they gave a third group a prominently visible dummy body cam that did not record, and the police officer knew it, but to others it would look like there was a body cam?
And possibly a fourth group a working body cam that was barely visible to others?
With variations like these, one might be able to tease out more information about the causal relationships.
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…
This seems like an issue with the study as the control group is also under the watch of a camera.
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What's the law say about recording police?
I believe in every jurisdiction that it's been tested it's been found to be constitutionally protected.
Even if you do prove they stopped you from recording, so what? You don't have evidence of your interaction to implicate them. As long as they recite the magical words, that they believed they were in the right, current legal doctrine will look the other way(see Heien vs North Carolina - https://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/12/16/heien-v-north-carol... - and similar).