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Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

propublica.org

181–190 of 240 posts

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work as a subcontractor for a federal contractor in healthcare, and I can see all of them if I wanted to. We just don't. I also work in healthcare, I'd like to see you make that request. edit: To draw an analogy. you may work for a credit bureau but if you start requesting records for celebrities you're not going to be working there for very long. I've _built_ the systems put in place to limit and monitor for the…

>I'd like to see you make that request. Cute of you to think that there's a 'request' part. My point was that we do need to check them to see if x site/app/tab is working or not after patching. It's part of our job. Edit: I think the confusion here might be you're thinking US Federal. I am not.

HIPAA has requirements for logs and that includes logging access to data. What company is this that isn't following those regulations such that you can crack open raw logs at any time?

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#182
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Thankfully", following on from the outrage following this (it was 2018), some states have criminalized it... though only six, now that I look into it. So the accurate number is now 29. Hell, it only became criminal for federal police 18 months ago! Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-c...

[deleted]

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work as a subcontractor for a federal contractor in healthcare, and I can see all of them if I wanted to. We just don't. I also work in healthcare, I'd like to see you make that request. edit: To draw an analogy. you may work for a credit bureau but if you start requesting records for celebrities you're not going to be working there for very long. I've _built_ the systems put in place to limit and monitor for the…

Then you would know that HIPAA allows for one subset of the above, health information to be shared for treatment purposes even without patient authorization , as long as reasonably safeguarded. I'm not saying that encapsulates everything that person says. But "reasonable safeguards" absolutely include a lot of the things you say are unacceptable. I worked for a company that built claims benefits management systems, i…

what the person said was "we could access any data we want, we just don't".

There's no way they fall under one of those exemptions, especially if they don't need it to do their job. If anything, the statement "we just don't" is indicative that they wouldn't fall under those exemptions.

But really the point was that this stuff is heavily regulated. If a company isn't following those regulations that's going to bite them in the ass eventually.

Typically speaking, you can convince auditors of a lot of things but it only takes getting the wrong auditor for it to all go down hill.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#184
post #128
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you list some of the ways police have been stripped of their ability to do their job?

Some DA's sudden refusal to prosecute a variety of property and drug crimes is a good example. No use catching criminals if they're just let loose.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#185
post #136

I'm just going to give my personal opinion - I think this article does a great job of arguing, in a somewhat roundabout way, that the NYPD has failed to create proper accountability through the release of body camera footage. It really makes no sense that all body cam footage is not automatically public record in the case of the death of the civilian. But at the same time, it does a poor job of arguing that the two r…

In both shootings, the officers didn't follow standard procedure (let the ESU take over the situation), and instead went all Rambo on the victims. Then failed to render aid after they pumped dozens of rounds into each victim. Or they let had a dog handler attack a suspect (killing him), then laughed about "getting a bite." All three of these cases described are disgusting instances of police overreach and failure.

Look, this is always a pointless debate to go back-and-forth about because it tends to become more dominated by emotion than logic.

What I will say is that I do believe all the incidents described in the article were tragedies, and sadly preventable. And I do believe there were breaches of protocol by officers at the scene in all of the cases.

But I just plain don't believe that the turning point moment for Richards and Trawick was the officers' decision to use force. If a mentally ill person has reached the point of charging at police officers holding a knife (and/or whatever Richards was doing with his knife and fake gun), they were already failed, woefully, by society and by their support network.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is there a button at all? Record everything all the time. Sort it out later. The vast majority of it will be useless footage, but so what? If I was a cop I would certainly want every donut I eat to be recorded if it also means there is no change I get falsely accused of improper interaction with the public. 99.9% of the time no one will look at my donut footage.

I believe it would be acceptable for the camera to be turned off when the police officer steps into a bathroom during a break to use the facilities.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#187
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing while an officer was violating someone's rights. You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks. Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure. Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.

> Are there exceptions [where it's truly accidental] > Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure. If you're trying to be fair by including the former sentence, then that should also include a "many, many" before "exceptions" unless you have the data I was asking after. As it stands, this adds no further information > You can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing w…

> If you think the cops are so bad, what about the criminals?

The criminals don't have the power of the state behind them. We're supposed to hold police to a higher standard than criminals.

> but if it were knowable then the citizen would have brought it to court rather than to the media,

Why would you think that? Do you think that courts and lawyers are free? Most people in the US have to work to survive and live paycheck to paycheck. Missed work means they can lose their homes. Even if someone had the time and the money to fight against the police in court the courts are heavily biased in favor of the police and they would have to live in fear of retaliation for the rest of their lives.

Even when police are caught on camera clearly committing crimes there is no guarantee that anything will be done about it. Evidence doesn't always mean much when the police can investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong.

If police are supposed to have body cam footage and don't, they shouldn't be believed.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#188

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…

> And I have to assume bodycam software is less reliable than iOS/Android.

Uh, no?

I'd naive assume it would be much simpler and more reliable, and that failure to do something like recharge or upload data would log an exception somewhere that would get immediate attention. When the 'IT guy' goes to work the next morning they should see that one of the bodycams didn't do its thing the night before and that bodycam should get replaced. The maximum window of failiure should be 24h or less, and multiple failures happening to all responding officers shouldn't really be possible since they should have a MTBF exceeding a year.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which also "proves" that cops aren't doing jack shit about organized looting, so that's no longer a useful argument.

Of course they aren't, when apprehending a violent suspect in the "wrong way" may land you jobless and in jail. The looters and other criminals are operating under a protection racket run by the so-called democrats, see for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-dean-preston-socia...

> Of course they aren't, when apprehending a violent suspect in the "wrong way" may land you jobless and in jail.

If the "wrong way" means beating them while handcuffed or choking them to death then I don't see what the problem is. Any police officer who is too scared to do their job because they don't think they can even stop a shoplifter without violating that person's rights isn't cut out to be a cop and shouldn't have the job in the first place.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#190
post #87
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would genuinely make a huge positive difference (though it would not, of course, fix the whole system, since the House is not the only place with problems). There's no need, in this day and age, to have the entire House of Representatives meet physically in one building.
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