Chicago has been and is synonymous with corruption. It's not a surprise.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-11...
Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
151–160 of 178 posts
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues. If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral k…
> If you're concerned about writing potentially sensitive video to non-volatile storage, that can be solved via technical means. Just encrypt the video with an ephemeral key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds. Once you've recorded that video it's subject to FOIA requests and rules of evidence and all kinds of things like that. If your recording only inc…
>10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud
that might seem a lot if there's only one server, but it's really not that much considering that it's going to be uploaded from multiple precincts. Wikipedia says there are 21 "districts", so that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution.
>20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.
If it's being stored using aws glacier deep archive, that's only $20k/month. That's probably a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the costs associated with running such a service.
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#153With all the smart sensors available today it should be possible to start recording automatically. You unholster or unbuckle your weapon, camera goes live. It's become far too easy to say you forgot to do activate it in the heat of the moment. Even a 20yo car knows when a passenger is or isn't sitting in the seat.
You can buy dash cams now with a 24 hour circular buffer and an onboard battery that lasts just as long. It would not be hard to just record everything for an entire shift, then copy the video to a server while the body camera is recharging.
Bandwidth is still the limiting factor here. Even with on-premise offload and storage, many municipalities aren't built to move the volume of data of recording every officer all the time. Add that cloud services are the bodycam goto which requires an Internet upload speed to match...
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability, as long as the majority voters in that city/county are ok with it. I think that's a problem and that going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems.
> Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability, as long as the majority voters in that city/county are ok with it. In the extremely unlikely event that a majority are ok with it, yes, that would be correct as far as local laws are concerned. That's what "freedom" means: it means people are free to make mistakes. Note, however, t…
It's unlikely that voters would be ok with all-around corruption of the police, but not unlikely at all that they'd be ok with, for example, harassment or overuse of force against minorities. Historically the Jim Crow south is a direct product of local policies, so I think the historical record supports this view in fact.
While state and federal government aren't devoid of corruption either, at least more homogeneity can be achieved at these levels. Local jurisdictions are more prone to extreme population disparities just by virtue of being smaller.
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#155Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the U.S.[0], and is rising rapidly[1]; but, invariably the criticism is focused solely on the police. By the weight of coverage and outrage, one would think that Chicago faces no issues other than bad police. Yes they should have their body cams on. Why so little attention to the reality in Chicago that the police are facing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Uni…
Arguably the high crime rate could be because the police are unaccountable. Why bother solving difficult murders when it's easier to just harass people on the the street to pad your arrest stats?
Police are totally unaccountable. Chicago police receives over 40% of the city's budget. The police profit off of crime in the city. As crime rises there are often calls to fund the police more to combat it rather than invest in the communities where crime is the highest.
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving it up to local voters makes it sound like it's ok for a police dept to misbehave, eg harass minorities or evade accountability I apologize, but I don't quite get how you arrived at the conclusion you have, specifically this point. Help me out here?
Police in small towns are staffed by the good ol' boys club that have no problem with Bob selling cocaine because most of the force has been friends with him since 2nd grade, but God help you if you drive down their highways with an out of state plate or the wrong skin color.
This
Here's a good example. Sheriff, under the influence, attempts to interfere with the arrest of a stabbing suspect, buddy of his. https://youtu.be/pKraZkl0-eA
We know about this one sheriff because his staff stood up to him and he got arrested but it tells you a lot about the quality of local law enforcement in small towns.
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of defunding the police is not an attempt to eliminating the police force. It is just a name that tries to capture the fact many US police forces look more like an army than a typical police force found in other parts of the world. That is what needs to change.
That is the "sanewashed" version of the slogan, yes. Ultimately it's classic motte-and-bailey, a slogan that means entirely different things depending on whether you're playing attack or defence at any given time.
If you're aware there are multiple interpretations of the slogan, why not assume good faith, and debate the "sane" meaning of the phrase? Most people are centrists, so the "insane" interpretations are never going to get any sort of audience any way. Debating the "insane" interpretation is easy - a cheap win.
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#158I'm stunned that people are having a hard time getting accountability from a police department known for having a “black site” where they routinely tortured suspects. If only there was some sort of sign that these people can't be trusted.
I think there's so many signs they can't be trusted but I personally often find people don't believe it to be systemic or institutional and therefore it doesn't impact their overall opinion. Homan Square is a well known police black site but it still exists today despite so many protests
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory: I'm betting in these communities where people tend to say this, schools are falling into disrepair, classes are overcrowded, and a substantial number of students rely on school free lunch and breakfast for their nutrition. So it's natural such communities would want less money to go to police, which they probably see as victimizing a community, putting people in jail for low-level drug crimes and messing w…
It would seem such communities would be the ones with most to gain from a better funded police force and justice system, one that could permanently remove the criminals from their midst.
The US already has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the developed world. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe these communities have seen what the justice system has to offer and want to try something else for certain classes of problems?
Re: Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams
#160As a Chicago resident who has been involved in multiple protests, Chicago police are very lax with their body cams. During protests this past summer many officers had no badge, nameplate, or body cam present. This results in absolutely no accountability of this individual and their actions. The police have much to benefit with civil unrest and crime in the city. Chicago police receive 40% of the city's budget. We invest so heavily in policing yet we are known for our murder rate. Police do not prevent the violence in Chicago they only respond to it. This is because the police profit off of the crime in Chicago. The city continues to refuse to divest from policing and invest in the communities which are struggling the most.