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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

#111

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

Clubber wrote: post #75
pydry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely a national problem. Moreover corrupt cops thrive because of close knit relationships between local DAs, local law enforcement, local judges and local politicians. A national wrecking ball is needed to break these toxic corrupt relationships and a strong, national institution is needed to create the institutional inertia against systemic police corruption from arising again. You can't vote corruptio…

It's a national problem in the sense that it happens all over the nation and isn't limited to a particular department. It's a state and local problem in the sense that legally, the states and local governments have jurisdiction over their police force. The US is a union of states. Although we have a pretty massive and powerful federal government, many things are the responsibility of the states and the federal govern…

States in the union are bound by the U.S. Constitution; If a state's government exhibits a pattern of denying its citizens their constitutionally-guaranteed rights (often in the form of quite literally _ending those citizens' lives_), it is absolutely the Federal government's job to compel that problem into nonexistence.

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

#112

Post by JumpCrisscross »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #10
wombatpm wrote: 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…

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.

> personally paid malpractice insurance

Money is fungible. Even if the union doesn’t negotiate this insurance on a group level, passing along the premium could be quite easily baked into contract negotiations.

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

#113

Post by whimsicalism »

stevesearer wrote: post #28
sneak wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was on a jury a number of years ago on a suspected DUI case where the police officer for the case failed to complete the proper paperwork and record of events at the time of arrest. As a jury we ended up deciding that the defendant was Not Guilty because without that filed paperwork, it was just two people's recollection of the events and we didn't feel the officer was more trustworthy. I wouldn't have thought much…

This is actually not uncommon at all for DUI cases, usually because jurors can empathize with the defendant more than in other cases (often of similar socioeconomic background, race, etc. which is sometimes less common for other criminal trials).

There's a reason that DUI defendants almost universally request jury trials.

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

#114

Post by Clubber »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #111
Clubber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a national problem in the sense that it happens all over the nation and isn't limited to a particular department. It's a state and local problem in the sense that legally, the states and local governments have jurisdiction over their police force. The US is a union of states. Although we have a pretty massive and powerful federal government, many things are the responsibility of the states and the federal govern…

States in the union are bound by the U.S. Constitution; If a state's government exhibits a pattern of denying its citizens their constitutionally-guaranteed rights (often in the form of quite literally _ending those citizens' lives_), it is absolutely the Federal government's job to compel that problem into nonexistence.

Well they ain't doin' it.

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

#115

Post by vkou »

Body cams are an expensive diversion that tries to use technology to solve a legal, procedural problem. HN loves them, because hey, there are interesting technical questions about their deployment, but they accomplish nearly nothing.

The real issue is that even when police impropriety is discovered, with mountains of evidence to support it, oversight bodies have no ability to censure the officers involved.

In Seattle, for example, the civilian oversight office offers non-binding disciplinary suggestions to the only body that can discipline police officers - their union. Unsurprisingly, the union takes those non-binding suggestions, and puts them right into the paper shredder. On the county level, until quite recently, the oversight organization couldn't even subpoena records from the sheriff's department - it would ask the department to turn over records, and the department would kindly tell them to go pound sand.

The only other form of oversight is raising a criminal case against the officer involved. Because of the discretionary nature of prosecution in this country, and because of a huge conflict of interest, where 99% of the time, prosecutors work in tandem with the police, prosecutions are frequently sabotaged for political reasons. (See the Breonna Taylor indictment - where the prosecutor deliberately sabotaged the case he presented to the grand jury.)

And on top of that, the bar for a criminal conviction of a police officer is astronomically high.

No amount of body camera technology is going to fix either of those three problems.

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

#116

Post by pdonis »

bigbubba wrote: post #68
pdonis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, but that just means prosecuting individual cases. That is very different from trying to make systemic changes in the way local cops operate; those kinds of changes must be made by local governments, and are the kind of changes local citizens should be demanding, and should be voting local governments out of office for not making.

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

#117

Post by mereel »

yardie wrote: post #4

With all the smart sensors available today it should be possible to start recording automatically. You unholster or unbuckle your weapon, camera goes live. It's become far too easy to say you forgot to do activate it in the heat of the moment. Even a 20yo car knows when a passenger is or isn't sitting in the seat.

> You unholster or unbuckle your weapon, camera goes live.

This has already been around for a few years https://www.axon.com/products/axon-signal-sidearm, not sure about adoption numbers though

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

#118

Post by pdonis »

ridaj wrote: post #65
pdonis wrote: 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…

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.

> 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.

In the extremely unlikely event that a majority are ok with it, yes, that would be correct as far as local laws are concerned. That's what "freedom" means: it means people are free to make mistakes. Note, however, that if the corrupt local cops are violating state or federal law, they're still liable even if a majority of local voters are ok with it. I don't have a problem with, for example, local cops being prosecuted for violating a citizen's Constitutional rights.

However, I strongly doubt that a majority of voters in these localities are actually ok with police corruption. I think they either don't bother voting because they don't think it will make any difference, or don't know about the corruption because they haven't personally experienced the consequences. Even in a large city like, e.g., Chicago, the majority of voters will never have a personal encounter with a city cop.

> going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems

You're assuming that the state and federal levels of government don't also have systematic problems that would prevent them from fixing corruption. That strikes me as a highly unlikely assumption.

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

#119

Post by pdonis »

pydry wrote: post #50
pdonis wrote: 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…

This is absolutely a national problem. Moreover corrupt cops thrive because of close knit relationships between local DAs, local law enforcement, local judges and local politicians. A national wrecking ball is needed to break these toxic corrupt relationships and a strong, national institution is needed to create the institutional inertia against systemic police corruption from arising again. You can't vote corruptio…

> You can't vote corruption out of office. It has to be rooted out from outside

In other words, if the corruption is not just particular localities, but infects the national government as well, then we're all screwed?

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

#120

Post by kbenson »

davidf560 wrote: post #105
kbenson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, C…

> 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. If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this a…

There are laws in some states about parties consenting to be recorded, I'm not sure how that interacts with the police and their recording, but my guess is that it's mostly untested until it hits a court or if specific exemptions exist or were added.

I understand and agree with people's need and right for privacy (although I'm not quite sure how the right interacts with this depending on who starts the interaction), but I think if HIPAA like stringency requirements were enacted on the data, with severe penalties, we could possibly hit a sweet spot where people had an expectation that their interaction videos would be private, and yet we could still rely on active monitoring by video of what those we've enabled with extra rights and abilities for the purpose of protecting us actually do, as a form of oversight.

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