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Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

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Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#211

Post by feoren »

kkielhofner wrote: post #163
greedo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get to see the videos the police want you to see; the videos that reinforce the idea that cops are in a continual state of absolute danger despite all the occupational studies that show it's a relatively safe job. Copaganda...

I was hesitant to write this comment because even though I consider my stance fairly nuanced (with my comment reflecting that) dismissive statements like "copaganda" don't make for any kind of reasonable debate. But I'll try. When I was on a ride along and I watched a guy who just brutally beat his pregnant girlfriend (who was bleeding on the ground in the front yard) charge at us and end up rolling around on the gro…

Not to discount any of your experiences, but you're countering with something different than the point being made. The question is: of your experiences, which ones would show up with footage on these YouTube channels? I'm willing to bet that every moment of someone being aggressive toward the cop would show up. Would him hitting on the girl show up? Would the questionable level of retaliatory force show up, especially if it had gotten out of hand? Would there be video of the (assuming) hours of questioning people handcuffed on a curb?

You came away with a nuanced and complicated view on policework, which is probably close to reality. Is that really the story these YouTube body-cam compilations tell?

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#212

Post by eightysixfour »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #209
eightysixfour wrote: post #205

I’ve always thought the obvious play here in a capitalist driven society is to require police officers to have private insurance. Insurance companies would quickly land on: 1. No camera, no insurance 2. A national registry for individual officer history Having exclusive use of legal force needs some kind of counter balance. Not sure what else could do it.

We've tried this, the police refuse.

I mean at some point refusals only go so far. I’m absolutely not pretending it would be easy, but when you refuse to do your job under new conditions for your employer… you lose your job. New police departments wouldn’t be the worst thing for a lot of cities.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#213

Post by HDThoreaun »

eightysixfour wrote: post #212
HDThoreaun wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tried this, the police refuse.

I mean at some point refusals only go so far. I’m absolutely not pretending it would be easy, but when you refuse to do your job under new conditions for your employer… you lose your job. New police departments wouldn’t be the worst thing for a lot of cities.

> when you refuse to do your job under new conditions for your employer… you lose your job

Ideally yes, but when every cop in the city refuses to do their job at the same time the city doesnt really have a choice. Firing every police officer is not an option for politicians who want to be re-elected.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#214

Post by FireBeyond »

denton-scratch wrote: post #195
FireBeyond wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The officers claimed it was consensual and the courts agreed. That's pretty nutty. I don't know the backstory, but even if it's "consensual" it's still statutory rape to have sex with a minor. > I do not believe they even faced disciplinary action. Not even that administrative process? How come the courts had anything to say about it, then? ...I guess that must have been the minor's court appearance, not the cops.…

> I don't know the backstory, but even if it's "consensual" it's still statutory rape to have sex with a minor.

I believe she was a minor but above the age of consent in that state.

And yeah, there's the whole question of "why are cops having sex while on duty?" - that's inappropriate even if it's your spouse, let alone someone you're interacting with in an official capacity, let alone someone who is in custody and detained, let alone someone who is handcuffed at the time.

There are so many separate levels of "what the actual f" here.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#215

Post by woleium »

irq-1 wrote: post #199
brandonbloom wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Axon) 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 unhol…

Publicly sharing hashes of video segments as they're created, would validate both the existence of, and unaltered nature of the video.

This is one of the few good use cases for a blockchain outside of crypto

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#216

Post by lotsoweiners »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #181
lannisterstark wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

But what if this person has direct access to the database? I’m a developer for my local government and have direct read/write access to many system’s production data. I could not only read but also update important info about people without going through an application all while logged in as the applications SQL ID. In fact I have to do this to handle tickets that are caused by limitations in the system.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#217

Post by Der_Einzige »

aaomidi wrote: post #39
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…

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.

Doesn’t matter how much you pay them, if the cops think the people hate them, they will refuse to take jobs in a locality.

Portland PD is paying far above average and is funded to hire hundreds of cops, but no one applies because the cops know they’re muzzled in Portland and they know that the local people abd laws don’t support a “thin blue line”

The remaining cops who stayed on have “quiet quit” and they use that as a tactic to get the people to give them more power. It’s a terrible situation. The cops know they can hold the people hostage and they aggressively do that.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#218

Post by smsm42 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #192
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. You mean it's not a felony to destroy evidence?

In theory, it is. In practice, prosecutors are very reluctant to go after cops for such type of crimes, or for any others that relate to their professional functions - perjury, excessive force, evidence tampering, violating disclosure rules, unlawful searches, etc. Plus, there's qualified immunity thing, which makes it very hard to gain a successful conviction even if the prosecutor is willing. It'll take a big SCOTUS decision dismantling that construct to start seeing any change there, and that may take a long while to happen.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#219

Post by Der_Einzige »

greedo wrote: post #128
waihtis wrote: 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?

See all the law changes in Oregon since 2018. Cops for example can’t pull you over for ghetto cars anymore. Cops can’t use the smell of weed as probable cause, and far far more.

Re: Police have undermined the promise of body cameras

#220

Post by Der_Einzige »

NickC25 wrote: post #180
jstarfish wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who cares if anyone here has gone through the police academy? It's almost like training is required to do a job. Wow, what a concept! > You have to memorize and demonstrate understanding of law No shit...that's the entire premise of the job. Someone whose job it is to enforce the law needs to actually know the law. > pass an obstacle course You should see some of the cops in the cities I've lived in (Bay Area, NYC, P…

Hell, I’ve literally watched cops use their lights so that they could go to a damn donut shop more quickly. I couldn’t believe it as I watched them pull into a krispy kream drive-thru.

Seen plenty of obese cops too. No idea how they stay on the force.

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