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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

#81

Post by rekoil »

CptFribble wrote: post #68
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is my take as well. Complement it with asking the officer to try to identify periods where the video might need to be deleted to save a whole bunch of time for those working to process the data.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#82

Post by waihtis »

meepmorp wrote: post #75
waihtis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give the police what they want Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?

In the context of the conversation, the interpretation of "give police what they want," is clearly something like, "defer to the departments about how they handle bodycam footage, policies about recording, and discipline for officers that don't conform to related laws and policies." The fact that you chose an unrelated topic couched in deliberately inflammatory language only shows bad faith on your part.

true and I apologize. But I also think it can be tied to the larger picture where the police is both forced into better accountability (good) and stripped down of the ability to do their job (bad), for which "organizational resistance" is a completely valid countermeasure.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#83

Post by mantas »

tylerdinner wrote: post #61

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…

Yeah, some confidentiality issues.. I'm pretty sure such system would be abused. To leak footages of low situation in peoples' lives. To make sure cops enforce rules by the letter even if situation is objectively silly on the spot. To get dirt on cops by logging mistakes which everybody does.

That's like requiring screensharing + camera on for remote workers 100% of the time. It sucks.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#84

Post by maxwell »

paxys wrote: post #44
lotsofpulp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally closed door legislative sessions that are not transparent. Plus the adage “business is done on the golf course”.

So you want all elected officials to wear a camera 24x7? Because hey, they could be doing business while taking a shit? Better keep it on at night as well, because we want to see the face of whoever they're screwing. Here's a better idea – elect people who can be trusted.

Reps in the U.S. are very much trusted, by their donors. The problem is House elections are too expensive, because representation is so bad, so only those who take considerable corporate bribes have a shot.

While "virtual," American colonists had better representation in the British Parliament on paper than we do today.

We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries:

https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...

We need to repeal the Apportionment Act of 1929 and expand the House to an appropriate size.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#85

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

CptFribble wrote: post #68
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah, that's what we want, 3rd parties having access to SSN's, addresses, psychiatric details, etc.

This all works in theory but not practice. If we were try to implement that in 20 years people would be complaining about fraud tracked down to some minimum wage worker reviewing tapes for these 3rd parties.

this is why I said there's not an easy answer.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#86

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

I never saw promise in body cameras. The organization they were meant to make accountable is the same organization that gets to edit the video, gets to turn the cameras on and off, gets to refuse to release them, gets to release them at the most opportune time, gets to, and gets to "lose" them if there's no way to scrub their misbehavior.

If that weren't enough to know how useless they'd be, we'd had dash cams for t least 20 years at that point (since Rodney King? I can't remember honestly, but mid-1990s anyway). Nothing improved. No less abuse, no better outcomes. We had already run the experiment, but collectively decided that the results were wrong.

So, why did we bother to camera up all the cops? Because intelligence agencies wanted millions of cameras out there the feeds from which they could watch. They wanted mobile cameras, not fixed. And we're still 20 or 30 years too early for the robot revolution. It had to be meat drones.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#87

Post by maxwell »

danaris wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want all elected officials to wear a camera 24x7? Because hey, they could be doing business while taking a shit? Better keep it on at night as well, because we want to see the face of whoever they're screwing. Here's a better idea – elect people who can be trusted.

No matter how trustworthy someone is when they get elected, there is always a chance for them to become corrupt once in office. After all, before they've actually held public office, there's little to no incentive or opportunity to be corrupt—and the higher the office, the higher both become. We need effective rules of ethics (with teeth) and oversight procedures. I don't think that forcing every politician to wear a…

How about we just go back to expanding the House based on population instead of keeping it static at 435 forever? We're approaching a million constituents per representative. Corruption seems a mathematical certainty.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#88

Post by waihtis »

zo1 wrote: post #76
waihtis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give the police what they want Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?

If they were given the ability to properly and violently stop these shenanigans (violent store and street mobs/takeovers), you bet that the next week there'd be more BLM looting sprees. This is nothing but bullies pushing their way and the rest of civil society being too scared to push back because they don't want to escalate to the level of violence that the bullies are very comfortable with. Whether we're discussin…

100% spot on

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#89

Post by danaris »

engineer_22 wrote: post #47
btbuildem wrote: post #22

> And so 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 [..] with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. I think it's incredibly naive to portray this as a "defaulting" or "failing to grapple with a fundamental question". I am 100% certain "wh…

If you don't believe Management Confidential down at the department is worthy of the public trust, you have a bigger problem on your hands. In my locale those folks are elected or appointed, so if you cant trust them, yea, you've got a problem.

A number of very high-profile police departments—in their entirety—have shown themselves empirically to be unworthy of the public trust in the past few years.

Yes, we have a very big problem on our hands. The system itself is deeply corrupted by perverse incentives and by a very large number of people with strong leanings toward authoritarianism and fascism.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#90

Post by Aachen »

manicennui wrote: post #65
crazygringo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that an assumption, or based on any particular data set or even just a few data points you've anecdotally read about?

The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be believable for me. Maybe in low-income/low-justice countries that's an assumption one can make, but not where I live at least.

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