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Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

propublica.org

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Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#61

Post by tylerdinner »

They're public servants. That footage should be public property.

Just like "this call may be monitored for blah blah", your actions as a cop should be monitored by the public.

Maybe we should have local citizens watching/reviewing body cam footage 24/7 to make sure cops are doing their job correctly. It's also job creation.

Edit: obviously there are some confidentiality issues, so only certain folks should have that clearance. But it feels like we need a better oversight system, whatever that may be.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#62

Post by jstarfish »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #33
NickC25 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. So much this. The problem is that due to the underlying need for police cooperation in unrelated cases, no sane DA or judge would dare challenge a cop (or the police union) who can claim "oh it was a malfunction" or "oh uh the battery ran out" when it comes time for video footage to be reviewed and made public in the case of a police officer breaking the law. My proposal: make it someone's (or an anonymous boar…

I agree with this except I think that policing should also be a highly educated position matching the expectations. Social workers and teachers are generally required to have graduate degrees, for example. Police academies are a scant few weeks in America, and these are people who enforce complex law in the most crucial life-or-death circumstances. Cops should be the best of us.

You've never been through police academy, have you? It's like training for a fucking pentathlon.

You have to memorize and demonstrate understanding of law, pass an obstacle course, meet marksmanship standards, pass a driving test under extreme conditions, and more. It's no joke. And they have to recertify on a lot of this yearly.

Nobody's perfect. None of their critics can actually do that job. Most couldn't clear the first fence in the obstacle course. You'd hate being subject to the same surveillance at work as well.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#63

Post by waihtis »

meepmorp wrote: post #58
aaomidi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we negotiating with police for this anyway? And if the police union is threatening to strike, then who cares. Those cops are not the ones we want anyway. Rehire.

> Why are we negotiating with police for this anyway? Because if you don't, you get election ads with scary looking footage and a voice-over that says something like: "Mayor/Governor/whatever Smith's anti-police crusade is putting you and your family in danger. This November, send a message by voting out the pro-crime politicians." You could argue that politicians should make a principled stand against this and do th…

> give the police what they want

Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#64

Post by danaris »

sixothree wrote: post #6

Without adversarial third party oversight police will continue to abuse the public.

Yep. Body cameras are an attempt at a technological solution to a sociocultural problem—and those rarely work.

We need to either change the culture—and adversarial third-party oversight is a forcible way to do that—or remove the tools the police use to abuse the public.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#65

Post by manicennui »

crazygringo wrote: post #48
WillAdams wrote: post #5

A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is such that it may be used as evidence in court. Body camera footage should be viewed as an extension of that, and when missing or unavailable, that absence should be viewed in the same light as a failure to properly document something in a duty log --- it is a der…

On the one hand, as a matter of principle -- absolutely. On the other hand, bodycams run out of batteries or the electronics glitch or automated video downloads get skipped, in ways that simply don't happen with paper notebooks or data stored in central databases. To assume that it's always a dereliction of duty is not going to be reasonable in practice . Like, for whatever reason my cell phone doesn't automatically…

It's curious how these problems are highly correlated with the police doing questionable shit.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#66

Post by kemayo »

engineer_22 wrote: post #42
WillAdams wrote: post #5

A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is such that it may be used as evidence in court. Body camera footage should be viewed as an extension of that, and when missing or unavailable, that absence should be viewed in the same light as a failure to properly document something in a duty log --- it is a der…

I think a jury would be very sympathetic to this argument.

You'd think so, but the average jury is extremely deferential to police.

In part because a lot of places include some questions about how you feel about the police in the standard jury screening interview, and expressing any negative opinion about police-reliability is likely to get you struck.

e.g. check out the NYC standard set of questions: https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/8-Colloquies/Voir%20Dire... -- note that 11.a is going to automatically exclude anyone who says something like "I've heard about the blue code, thanks".

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#67

Post by [deleted] »

jMyles wrote: post #3

Seems like this is the thesis: > As policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only…

[deleted]

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#68

Post by CptFribble »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #60
WillAdams wrote: post #5

A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is such that it may be used as evidence in court. Body camera footage should be viewed as an extension of that, and when missing or unavailable, that absence should be viewed in the same light as a failure to properly document something in a duty log --- it is a der…

The problem is that most people don't consider how much of that footage has privacy implications. They deal with people very single day, they need to be able to turn those cameras off in the case of, a nude minor, a detailing of psychiatric history of a minor, etc. The problem is that giving them that ability also opens the door for them to abuse it. There is no easy/good answer here. And I'm not making excuses for t…

I disagree, police should not be able to turn off the cameras, but the footage should NOT be public by default. Instead, the footage should be regularly audited by a vetted third party not connected to the police, police union, of families of police.

The footage should of course be archived for some long period of time measured in years for use in proceedings, and audits the discover significant periods of no footage not attributable to technical malfunction should be grounds for immediate dismissal of the officer.

Making allowances for the officer to decide when it's "appropriate" to turn off the camera will inevitably lead to the current situation of the cameras being not used nearly enough - only instead of "oops it was off" it will become "I used my judgement that this was a sensitive event and turned it off, whoops now no one knows who shot first"

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#69

Post by manicennui »

dcsommer wrote: post #11
Eumenes wrote: post #9

I want elected officials to wear body cameras too

"Transparency" in Congress has lead to grandstanding and posturing to cameras, at the expense of the necessary compromises and deals that could otherwise happen.

You are either being disingenuous or incredibly oblivious. People want to know what our elected officials are saying in private with lobbyists and campaign contributors.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#70

Post by kemayo »

koolba wrote: post #56
NickC25 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage. Also, make it so that if a cop is accused of violating rights or involved in foul play, and their body cam "suddenly malfunctioned or were turned off or was left in the car" , a default judgement is given against the officer in quest…

> Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage. Destroying evidence of a crime is already a felony. Conceal is a tricky one though as depending on placement the camera could definitely be obscured by normal day to day action (like a tussle). But again, if it can shown the action was deliberate, it’d be an action in furtherance of a crime.

The suggestion I've seen is to legislate changing the presumption such that if body camera footage is missing then it should be presumed to be foul play unless the police department can show evidence otherwise.
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