141–150 of 240 posts
Until it is a felony for a cop to turn off a camera, Until it is a felony to not upload all video within 1 hour of the end of the cops shift and make it publicly available on the web with geotagging left in place, I live under a tyranny.
I always said when this whole body cam business started years ago that everyone is going to be real fucking upset when they get live facial recognition on these things. Be careful what you wish for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is another example of "an untested backup doesn't exist", as well. Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage, if you treat your body cams as a backup -- and only look at it when something goes wrong -- you're going to discover that your body cams weren't working all along and no one noticed. And then you're going to look hella…
To my knowledge this is managed by the body cam vendors with the kinds of protections/assurances you would expect for something that will need to pass evidentiary chain of custody, etc for something to withstand scrutiny in court: https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-th... Almost kind of funny it uses the Axon-provided cloud at evidence.com. Not kidding. What this boils down to: if the camera foo…
It’s also worth noting that recording can be activated wirelessly by various triggers. The most obvious and common one being that a nearby officer’s camera was activated (either by physically pressing the button or via a chain reaction of wireless activations).
Depending on the available hardware/accessories & configuration, other sources of activation can include unholstering a weapon, aiming or discharging a taser, by computer aided dispatch, unlocking a weapon in the vehicle, activating the light bar, high vehicle speed, running, falling, crashing, and more.
In my opinion, if multiple officers are on the scene at least one axon recording device each: there is either video evidence or willful suppression of evidence. It’s that simple.
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…
Adverse inference should be be applied. Seriously.
For anyone else to whom this term is new: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference > is a legal inference, adverse to the concerned party, drawn from silence or absence of requested evidence. [...] According to Lawvibe, "the 'adverse inference' can be quite damning at trial. Essentially, when plaintiffs try to present evidence on a point essential to their case and can't because the document has been destroy…
If the police is refusing to release a video to prove their stance, there is absolutely no need to give the police the benefit of the doubt.
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> 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. However, in 35 states, and this blows my mind, an officer can have "consensual" sex with a detainee. Even if they are in handcuffs at the time. 35 states have decided that this is not improper from an "authority" p…
35 states allow for that? I would've assumed 0 states allow for it, because, well, come on. Might as well let officers consent to taking bags of money from detainees.
Hell, it only became criminal for federal police 18 months ago!
Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-c...
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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 th…
And surveillance? Give me a break. At my job, all my keystrokes are logged. Every website I go to is logged. My email and chat are archived and searched for keywords and AI. And I'm not tasked with "Protect and Serve." I work for an insurance company. Cops have life and death power, so as Spidey tells us, with power comes responsibility. Don't like it? Don't pick up the badge...
You should look at the educational and training requirements used by European police forces. They make the "police academy" look like the joke that it is. Or look at how the military trains MPs. MPs have a much better understanding and usage of force than the majority of police forces in the US.
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…
I'd argue that it's waaaay easier to make stable bodycam software than a stable mobile phone OS.
Without adversarial third party oversight police will continue to abuse the public.
If police fail to produce the footage, judges should instruct jurors that the adverse inference may be drawn (in case they're insufficiently skeptical to do so themselves).