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Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

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Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is for them to have to carry personally paid malpractice insurance that is tied to their access to qualified immunity. And if their camera is off they lose their insurance policy. Then no more access to qualified immunity. Being police is a luxury not a right.

We don’t need to create a private insurance market for yet another part of American life. Other countries have real oversight bodies with teeth that build public trust. It’s important that justice is done in these cases of abuse, and it also needs to be seen to be done by the public, which builds trust in the institutions of state.

Insurance exists for nearly everything. The difference in this particular scenario is the party responsibility for the liability.

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#62
post #22

Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the U.S.[0], and is rising rapidly[1]; but, invariably the criticism is focused solely on the police. By the weight of coverage and outrage, one would think that Chicago faces no issues other than bad police. Yes they should have their body cams on. Why so little attention to the reality in Chicago that the police are facing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Uni…

Arguably the high crime rate could be because the police are unaccountable. Why bother solving difficult murders when it's easier to just harass people on the the street to pad your arrest stats?

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#63
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juries, historically, uncritically accept unsubstantiated cop testimony at face value. It’s a huge problem.

I sat as a juror in a murder trial several years ago. My peers accepted nearly every piece of prosecutorial testimony without question, not just cops. It was really eye-opening. Because even if that hadn't happened, the whole concept of lesser included charges meant the man on trial was almost certain to be guilty of something. If it wasn't Murder 1, it was murder 2, or manslaughter, or wreckless endangerment. In my…

That's why a jury is so large, and conviction requires unanimity. Good for you. How many on your jury?

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need to create a private insurance market for yet another part of American life. Other countries have real oversight bodies with teeth that build public trust. It’s important that justice is done in these cases of abuse, and it also needs to be seen to be done by the public, which builds trust in the institutions of state.

The point of insurance is they have to pay for it personally. If the government pays for insurance and also pays for penalties, we are in the same situation we are today.

Unions would never allow that, and I highly doubt people on HN will be in support for weakening Public employee unions which I think should be completely abolished

//side note, FDR agreed.... which is ironic given that most people that support Public Employee unions think we need a new new deal FDR style

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#65
post #41
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America desperately needs a national internal affairs department with an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors). They could purchase, maintain the body cameras, collect and handle the footage and be trusted. If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.

No. This is not a national government problem. This is a local government problem. The solution is for citizens of those cities and counties to hold their local governments accountable and vote them out of office if they don't fix the problem. The last thing we need is more big government, one-size-fits-none policies dictated from above. We need more local people solving their own local problems. It would also help i…

Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability, as long as the majority voters in that city/county are ok with it. I think that's a problem and that going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems.

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#66
post #57
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is not a national government problem. This is a local government problem. The solution is for citizens of those cities and counties to hold their local governments accountable and vote them out of office if they don't fix the problem. The last thing we need is more big government, one-size-fits-none policies dictated from above. We need more local people solving their own local problems. It would also help i…

Buying instruments for public high school bands is a local problem. Cops killing citizens in broad daylight and not facing consequences is not a local problem, not any more than 9/11 was a local terrorism problem for residents of New York and Washington DC. "Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.

When a locally elected prosecutor refuses to prosecute local cops, that seems at least somewhat like a local problem. Also, it seems strange to me that there is so little mention of the role prosecutors play in police misconduct. Mayors and city councils too, who are generally responsible for nominating police chiefs (opposed to sheriffs, who are elected.) Cynically, I think a lot of prosecutors and local politicians are glad the public is so hyper-focused on the crooked cops that they forget to address the elected officials who enable those cops.

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#67

> The cameras are relatively simple to operate. They constantly record everything in front of them, but only save 30 seconds of video at a time. To record an entire incident, the officer must double press the “event” button in the center of the camera. So non-compliance is the default. And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the dou…

> Why not buffer 5 hours by default? Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new tech…

> a victim who has asked not to be recorded

That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.

> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.

It's a lot, but it's really just a matter of funding. If there's money to be paid for the service that someone can make a profit on, someone will step in to offer that service. I think the amount of storage required is actually pretty close to the amount Youtube adds in content every day (if we assume not all of the 800k police officers are recording every day, and not all of them are out on the street with a need to record). That's a lot, but the requirements aren't quite the same (you could start at high quality and re-encode to lower quality at age intervals unless flagged as important) instead of encoding to many qualities initially. Additionally there wouldn't need to be nearly as much serving infrastructure as youtube. It's the sort of problem the Federal government could throw a couple billion at a year that went to departments through grants and we would pretty quickly have a competitive field of companies offering storage for this as a service. Managing the security of the data would definitely need some regulation though.

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#68
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption, which I would think includes police departments that circle their wagons and protecting criminal cops. Probably they need to be doing a better job of it, but I believe they're meant to be (among other things) the organization you describe above. I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's my understanding the…

> the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption They have a certain amount of ability to do that if the state or local government is violating Federal law. But they do not have general oversight or police powers, since the Federal government as a whole does not. Nor is it supposed to.

Wouldn't local cops violating people's constitutional rights put them at odds with federal law?

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#69
post #14
post #5

If we really want body cameras to work, there needs to be penalties for nonuse. For example lack of body camera removes qualified immunity protections for the officer(s) in question. My personal philosophy is that if called to be on a criminal jury, if the case relies on the officer's testimony and there is no camera, I will return a verdict of not guilty under the justification that the state has failed to prove its…

America desperately needs a national internal affairs department with an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors). They could purchase, maintain the body cameras, collect and handle the footage and be trusted. If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.

I would agree with State level IA body operating under the AG of the state.

I reject the idea that all problems have a national solutions, which this seems to be a part of.

Federalism is good, and we should not continue the path of destruction of our federalist society

Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

#70

> The cameras are relatively simple to operate. They constantly record everything in front of them, but only save 30 seconds of video at a time. To record an entire incident, the officer must double press the “event” button in the center of the camera. So non-compliance is the default. And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the dou…

> Why not buffer 5 hours by default? Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new tech…

> Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.

Does it though? The source of all your objections here is that if body cameras had a 5 hour buffer, it's vitally important that buffer be saved even if nothing important happened. It's fine if you think that's true, but your alternative is to throw out all footage after a 30-second buffer unless an officer decides that they are in an important situation, implying that the footage missed is not important at all.

How about not offloading 5 hours of video if nothing happened? That's not somehow less honorable or ethical than never recording the video at all when you know, from endless examples, that the camera will often not be turned on in critical situations.

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