edit Will add context. Police oversight will always be a totally unbalanced fight for power. Police obviously do not want their behavior analyzed because of the obvious and frequent abuse of that power. For some reason, lots of america believes that being a police officer should come with total unchecked power amongst their communities - even so much as scrutinizing their use of excessive force has become a politicized nightmare.
So no, it is in no way surprising that police oversight is garbage and continues to give police easy outs.
The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. When you combine that with the privileged status that comes with law enforcement you get a real mess.
The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavoidable.
I never suggested dismantling all systems of social cohesion and accountability. I said too much of the power that maintains social order is vested in a single place.
Even if police has less power, they still can lie to you or give you misleading advice and then turn it against you and you will have no way to prove malice. I witnessed this couple of times and I was shocked that something like this is possible. I think to build the trust of the public, governments should invest in creating technology allowing recording all incidents in full. If there is no accountability all bad apples get free reign and you will have no recourse.
> The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources.
Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets.
Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response.
A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy.
This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.
Better still, get mentally ill homeless people off the street and into institutions where they belong.
Building a camp out in the desert somewhere where people like this can get three square meals and a bed would both be an improvement on their present situation and a total money saver once you take into account all the problems and waste of police/ambulance time that they cause. Even better if you extend it to drug addicts.
Why is it that the same people who think that the solution to bad public schools is more funding also think that the solution to bad police departments is less funding?
If the police are substandard it means we need to pay them more to get better quality applicants into the system.
We also need a better funded prison/drug rehab system so that police don't have to waste their time dealing with the sort of habitual offenders who should have been permanently removed from society a long time ago.
Why is it that the same people who think the solution to bad public schools is more oversight and accountability, seem to oppose increased oversight and accountability for bad police departments?
There's no indication that funding is an actual problem that a lot of these "bad" departments face. Teachers regularly have to buy their own supplies for their classrooms. Have you ever heard of a cop needing pay out of their own pocket for ammo for their service weapon, gas for their patrol car, or batteries for their radios?
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 with people's jobs and livelihood through bail/fines, and more money to go to schools, which they see as helping a community and providing beneficial services.
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?
With 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.
It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes.
That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.
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...
If we really want body cameras to work, there needs to be penalties for nonuse. For example lack of body camera removes qualified immunity protections for the officer(s) in question.
My personal philosophy is that if called to be on a criminal jury, if the case relies on the officer's testimony and there is no camera, I will return a verdict of not guilty under the justification that the state has failed to prove its case.
A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
I sat as a juror in a murder trial several years ago. My peers accepted nearly every piece of prosecutorial testimony without question, not just cops. It was really eye-opening. Because even if that hadn't happened, the whole concept of lesser included charges meant the man on trial was almost certain to be guilty of something. If it wasn't Murder 1, it was murder 2, or manslaughter, or wreckless endangerment.
In my case the guy was (as best I could conclude) legitimately guilty of one of the lesser included charges, but there was some dodgy testimony, and I was the only one, in my group, to question it, and suggest that it might have some bearing on which of the many charges that might actually make him guilty of. It took quite some convincing to get anyone else to drop to anything lower than the top charge.
While I realize that this sample size of 1 is statistically insignificant, it really seems like if you wind up in court on criminal charges, odds seem to be you're screwed. "Innocent until proven guilty" felt, to me, like a pipedream.
I was on a jury a number of years ago on a suspected DUI case where the police officer for the case failed to complete the proper paperwork and record of events at the time of arrest.
As a jury we ended up deciding that the defendant was Not Guilty because without that filed paperwork, it was just two people's recollection of the events and we didn't feel the officer was more trustworthy.
I wouldn't have thought much about it after the fact, except that the prosecution was visibly upset at the decision which made me realize that that was likely not what normally would have happened.
> I wouldn't have thought much about it after the fact, except that the prosecution was visibly upset at the decision which made me realize that that was likely not what normally would have happened.
I'm cynical enough about lawyers (having seen a few in action) that I wonder if "visibly upset" wasn't trying to manipulate someone - either the judge, or the jury members in case they serve on a jury again some day.
This is actually not uncommon at all for DUI cases, usually because jurors can empathize with the defendant more than in other cases (often of similar socioeconomic background, race, etc. which is sometimes less common for other criminal trials).
There's a reason that DUI defendants almost universally request jury trials.
I will be legitimately shocked if lack of compliance with body cams is what results in stripping qualified immunity after years of so many other reasons where people have died on camera in police custody failed at doing so.
We don’t need to create a private insurance market for yet another part of American life. Other countries have real oversight bodies with teeth that build public trust. It’s important that justice is done in these cases of abuse, and it also needs to be seen to be done by the public, which builds trust in the institutions of state.
The point of insurance is they have to pay for it personally. If the government pays for insurance and also pays for penalties, we are in the same situation we are today.
Unions would never allow that, and I highly doubt people on HN will be in support for weakening Public employee unions which I think should be completely abolished
//side note, FDR agreed.... which is ironic given that most people that support Public Employee unions think we need a new new deal FDR style
Regulatory capture is extremely common in American life, and many of our current policing issues can arguably be attributed in some large part to overly powerful police unions. So to me this sounds like a lip-service-non-solution waiting to happen.
Do they? I'm only familiar with the IPCC in the UK, and they are basically worthless. Germany, for example, doesn't even have something like the IPCC. Are there any examples of working police oversight bodies?
I think the parent means that it's a career choice that in the US is quite well payed especially after some tenure, given the level of training /education required. It also comes with a ton of job protection that's rare in the US, and a pension. Couple all of that with a monopoly on violence in society, and police in the US occupy a position of unusual privilege.
Money is fungible. Even if the union doesn’t negotiate this insurance on a group level, passing along the premium could be quite easily baked into contract negotiations.
Yes, on average. But the cops more at-risk of gross misbehavior, if correctly identified by the insurance companies (big if), would still be priced out of the market.
The difference is that insurance companies can choose not to insure someone. Reputation/history isn't fungible. Presumably they have skin in the game to have actuaries figure out who doesn't get to be an officer.
Not saying it's a good scheme just that there's more at play than just money.
America desperately needs a national internal affairs department with an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors).
They could purchase, maintain the body cameras, collect and handle the footage and be trusted.
If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.
It's my understanding that the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption, which I would think includes police departments that circle their wagons and protecting criminal cops. Probably they need to be doing a better job of it, but I believe they're meant to be (among other things) the organization you describe above.
I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's my understanding the Seattle PD are under some sort of probation system with the DOJ, which I'm guessing the FBI was involved with. So I think this sort of thing does happen, though I guess not enough.
> the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption
They have a certain amount of ability to do that if the state or local government is violating Federal law. But they do not have general oversight or police powers, since the Federal government as a whole does not. Nor is it supposed to.
Yes, and as a general rule when cases are brought they are under the auspices of a federal civil rights violation. These are very difficult cases to prosecute though, so I think the FBI overfocuses on lower hanging fruit unless there's a political motivation from the top to drive this.
Yes, but that just means prosecuting individual cases. That is very different from trying to make systemic changes in the way local cops operate; those kinds of changes must be made by local governments, and are the kind of changes local citizens should be demanding, and should be voting local governments out of office for not making.
I'm pretty sure trying to pass something like that would very quickly devolve into an argument about states rights. Probably rightly so, as even though oversight would be good, a Federal agency to do so might be problematic for many reasons.
Pretty much every state has their own, state-level investigation bureau [0]. Automatically transferring footage to an internal affairs department there would distance it from the actual department, while preserving state control.
Aside from activating / deactivating the camera (with clear guidelines and penalties for doing / not doing so), and connecting it to a network at the end of a shift, it should be a black box. None of the IT functions should run out of the same police force.
Consequently, this also protects officers in the case of equipment failure: timestamp the activation / deactivation signals in a separate log file. If the footage isn't there, but they activated, then it's no longer their reputation on the line, because they had no involvement in the chain of custody.
Yeah, a state department side-steps a lot of those problems (but also possibly lets states ignore it). A federal law requiring police interactions to be recorded and submitted to a state entity and requiring it be stored for a certain period would probably suffice. Then the FBI or whoever investigated an issue Federally (if it got to that) could subpoena it, since it's supposed to exist, and be handled by the state.
I agree it should be a black box. Rule #1 for accountability is that you don't rely on the entity that's being examined to give absolutely correct info. Whether that's debugging a process or reviewing an organization, outside instrumentation is essential.
That would be contrary to the whole spirit of Federalism. It would be like every EU country having a separate department of internal affairs which reports directly to Brussels, except, perhaps, even more politically inflammatory. I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with you, just noting that there's a big wall in the path of implementing the concept.
> The US is a single country with a single military.
Not... entirely accurate.
Many states possess their own military forces [0], and state National Guard units are dual-chained to both state and national military leadership [1] (in different scenarios).
No. This is not a national government problem. This is a local government problem. The solution is for citizens of those cities and counties to hold their local governments accountable and vote them out of office if they don't fix the problem. The last thing we need is more big government, one-size-fits-none policies dictated from above. We need more local people solving their own local problems.
It would also help if police were not tasked with enforcing a litany of nanny state laws that shouldn't even be on the books to begin with. Any cop that wants to mess with a citizen can always find some excuse; with all the laws we have, all of us are violating some law every day.
I don't think it can be broken down so simply. It's clear that the constitution has provisions specifically covering this (ex: 4th amendment), so the Federal courts at least have an interest in seeing the cases. As the highest law in the land, it's also pretty clear the 14th gives SOME federal oversight of violations of citizen's rights.
Moreover corrupt cops thrive because of close knit relationships between local DAs, local law enforcement, local judges and local politicians. A national wrecking ball is needed to break these toxic corrupt relationships and a strong, national institution is needed to create the institutional inertia against systemic police corruption from arising again.
You can't vote corruption out of office. It has to be rooted out from outside. Even the cleanest politicians cannot operate from within a corrupt system.
It's a national problem in the sense that it happens all over the nation and isn't limited to a particular department. It's a state and local problem in the sense that legally, the states and local governments have jurisdiction over their police force.
The US is a union of states. Although we have a pretty massive and powerful federal government, many things are the responsibility of the states and the federal government has limited ability to intervene. Using the FBI is one of the avenues I believe though.
States in the union are bound by the U.S. Constitution; If a state's government exhibits a pattern of denying its citizens their constitutionally-guaranteed rights (often in the form of quite literally _ending those citizens' lives_), it is absolutely the Federal government's job to compel that problem into nonexistence.
There is at least more visibility at the higher levels but in general, yeah. Most 3rd world countries with serious endemic corruption get stuck with it.
> Most 3rd world countries with serious endemic corruption get stuck with it.
They get stuck with it because 1st world countries insist on continuing to send aid even though the corrupt governments take all of it and it never benefits the people. Not to mention 1st world countries giving legitimacy to those corrupt governments in many other ways.
In other words, on a global level, the idea that corruption in 3rd world countries is "a global problem" has made the corruption worse, not better.
There have been apparent cases of police departments targeting local activists trying to bring about change through the local political process. When the local system is that thoroughly compromised, I don't see much alternative to bringing in a higher outside power (e.g. the feds, or maybe the state police if they aren't the dirty cops in question.)
Buying instruments for public high school bands is a local problem. Cops killing citizens in broad daylight and not facing consequences is not a local problem, not any more than 9/11 was a local terrorism problem for residents of New York and Washington DC.
"Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.
When a locally elected prosecutor refuses to prosecute local cops, that seems at least somewhat like a local problem. Also, it seems strange to me that there is so little mention of the role prosecutors play in police misconduct. Mayors and city councils too, who are generally responsible for nominating police chiefs (opposed to sheriffs, who are elected.) Cynically, I think a lot of prosecutors and local politicians are glad the public is so hyper-focused on the crooked cops that they forget to address the elected officials who enable those cops.
Bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a second symptom
Apathetic electorates electing bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a third symptom
Municipalities spread all around the country are suffering from the same combination of symptoms. Whether that suggests one national problem or the same local problem in replicate is a question of semantics.
> "Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.
No, "let Democratic State governments of the Southern states handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws. Localities would never have gotten away with it if the State governments had not supported them and helped them crack down on local citizens who pushed back.
> "Let local residents handle it" is also how we have legal marijuana and gay marriage.
Well, no, we nationally have gay marriage because of federal court decisions voiding state actions prohibiting same-sex marriage as violations of the federal Constitution.
And we don't have legal marijuana anywhere in the United States (we have states which have chosen not to layer state prohibition on top of federal prohibition for some acts involving marijuana, an federal law mandating deferring prosecution for certain acts involving medical marijuana that are consistent with state law. Anyone who actually makes significant money in marijuana would still be subject to the federal drug kingpin laws were the policy deferring prosecution ever to be lifted, and technically without that if any part of their business involved any acts not entirely within the required deferral of prosecution.)
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.
The sheriff is elected, and there's enough communities in the South where shitting on blacks is a way of life. Do you remember the case of the kid who went to prison because he had birdshit on his hood that the drug quicktest identified as cocaine? Dude only got out quickly because he played football (for I think UGA) and the coach intervened. That stuff, friend, is government-approved reality for many.
Historically giving power to local politics in the United States has been (sometimes) used to discriminate against populations. This is effectively what the Jim Crow south was, legal but unequal.
This isn’t to say that federal policies don’t also have issues. If we think something is a right of all citizens (Such as to not be subject to abuse by the police), that only really takes hold if it is applied across the nation, which is federal.
I think the parent is suggesting akin to a Tyranny of the Majority with a locally elected police.
For example, if I live in a small town that where 80% of the people intent their C code with tabs and I use spaces, they could theoretically elect a police chief who espouses tabs-jingoism and treats spaces-programmers less fairly.
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.
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.
> 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, that if the corrupt local cops are violating state or federal law, they're still liable even if a majority of local voters are ok with it. I don't have a problem with, for example, local cops being prosecuted for violating a citizen's Constitutional rights.
However, I strongly doubt that a majority of voters in these localities are actually ok with police corruption. I think they either don't bother voting because they don't think it will make any difference, or don't know about the corruption because they haven't personally experienced the consequences. Even in a large city like, e.g., Chicago, the majority of voters will never have a personal encounter with a city cop.
> going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems
You're assuming that the state and federal levels of government don't also have systematic problems that would prevent them from fixing corruption. That strikes me as a highly unlikely assumption.
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.
We have quasi-legal marijuana in some jurisdictions right now. It's still federally illegal everywhere and that's just not being enforced (I think because the Feds know that if they squeeze that particular watermelon seed that it will fly out of their fingers everywhere).
Sure, if you handwave away the real problem, which is how cops make the "aren't a threat" judgment in the heat of a situation, knowing that if they judge wrong they could end up dead. Making that judgment is highly situational, and how cops should judge individual situations is highly dependent on the locality; there simply is no one-size-fits-all set of rules you can give cops that will work.
Police officer isn’t even top 10 dangerous job in this country. I hate when people use that excuse for them flagrantly shooting somebody or their pet. Police training is the first place we can improve. Changing their mentality from a warrior to a guardian also does wonders in lowering use of force. There are real world solutions to this problem but almost half the country think those who got shot by police probably deserved it. Almost the same crowd protests wearing masks as stepping on their liberties. Absolutely illogical.
> Police officer isn’t even top 10 dangerous job in this country.
Overall, no. But the overall averages conceal a huge variation in risk by locality. I agree that "it's a dangerous job" doesn't excuse shooting innocent people or their pets. But the danger of the job in particular localities should not be underestimated.
> Changing their mentality from a warrior to a guardian also does wonders in lowering use of force.
Can you give specific examples? I agree with the general idea but I have not seen much actual data on specific localities where this is done or what effect it has.
> almost half the country think those who got shot by police probably deserved it
Citation needed.
> Almost the same crowd protests wearing masks as stepping on their liberties.
The protest is not against wearing masks where it makes sense to do so; it's against being ordered to wear masks whether it makes sense or not, and subjecting people to criminal penalties for non-compliance. For example, according to some orders (fortunately for me, not the one currently in effect where I live), you are subject to arrest for simply walking out your front door without a mask on, even if you remain on your own property and nobody else comes anywhere near you.
And don't forget that the same cops whose corruption and lack of judgment you and I both deplore will be the ones to enforce these orders. Frankly, it strikes me as illogical for people to be talking about defunding the police on the grounds of corruption on the one hand, and talking about issuing draconian orders that would have to be enforced by those same police on the other.
If you know that the next county over has corrupt cops, you shouldn't do business there.
I wish more people understood that the reason the USA was set up the way it was was to allow individual States and localities to compete. Corruption doesn't stand up well to competitive pressure: if all the productive people leave your town because the cops and the local government shake everybody down, your town won't survive. So where you see corruption, the first question you should ask is: what barriers are being put in the way of people just leaving?
> How much do you think those people in the corrupt area that everyone is trying to get out of and avoid are going to be able to sell their homes for?
How much did they buy them for in the first place if the place is corrupt and everyone is trying to get out?
If the place became corrupt after all those people moved there, well, whose fault is that? If your answer is "corrupt politicians and corporations who took advantage of the people", well, there's your barrier to free and open competition between localities.
> This "solution" is exactly what created the troubles of inner cities to begin with.
No, what created the troubles of inner cities was completely unrealistic political expectations. People thought that using the government to fix social problems was a wonderful idea. Inner cities today are tragic evidence of how wrong they were.
Most police departments have internal affairs departments, but these are largely toothless. I would not expect a national organization to perform much better. The incentives simply are not aligned: it is easy to see a politician leaning on the department saying "this will make me look bad, make it go away."
I think what would be more powerful would be to empower citizens to bring criminal cases against police offers acting in their official capacity. Then at least we could be assured that the prosecutors are motivated to win the case for their clients.
Local internal affairs departments don't work because your career is dependent upon this corrupt judge, DA, cop in your area with whom you will work again. You're incentivized not to look too closely because your career is on the line. Plenty of good cops who have uncovered corruption have been personally targeted this way.
In a national department? You get to the top by putting dirty cops in jail. Your boss's boss does not need to maintain an good relationship with a judge in Georgia. They win in their career by putting more dirty cops in jail.
The more national and centralized and separate from the rest of the police a department like this is the more ruthless it can be.
> America desperately needs a national internal affairs department ith an entirely separate reporting line whose boss answers directly to the president (or at least state governors).
The closest thing (and its fairly close, though it doesn't answer to the states or the President directly) is the US Department of Justice, particularly the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, which addresses "1) the rights of people in state or local institutions, including: jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and health care facilities for persons with disabilities; 2) the rights of individuals with disabilities to receive services in their communities, rather than in institutions; 3) the rights of people who interact with state or local police or sheriffs' departments; 4) the rights of youth involved in the juvenile justice system; 5) the rights of people to have safe access to reproductive health care clinics; and 6) the rights of people to practice their religion while confined to state and local institutions." [0]
But weakening oversight of local law enforcement by DoJ was a major early priority of the current Administration, so it hasn't been particularly active in the particular role you are concerned with for the last few years.
> If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.
I can't really imagine a Biden Administration not ramping activity regarding law enforcement oversight back up.
> A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
A couple of hung juries and prosecutors will be sure to start asking this specific question in order to strike you from the jury. They already do this for the death penalty.
Why is everyone busy inventing complicated penalties?
If wearing a body camera is a requirement of the job then the penalty for not doing so should be the same as the penalty for not doing any other aspect of your job, you get fired.
If they don't exceed the penalty for being caught in a particular instance of wrong doing, then it's not likely to be effective in those cases.. which are likely to be the most important of these cases.
> A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
DAs are elected. Let them know they shouldn't even bring these cases, or you're going to unseat them for even trying a single one.
We shouldn't rely on the long tail of justice to save us here, we need protections at every level of the system. Peoples lives hang in the balance during a trial, why should we chance it?
No, the fastest way to fix it is to invalidate any and all arrests and ticketing the officer performs while the camera is not functioning. Then publish when it occurs. Suddenly cameras will be everywhere.
While you cannot remove QI you can probably get away with unpaid leave when an officer is under investigation but I expect that to eventually get overturned by union activity.
Politically its radioactive, note the choices made on both sides for candidates and who got to speak at their relative conventions. If anything we will see increased funding for police with the typical wording to make it sound like we asked for it.
You are probably right that Hacker News isn't the best forum for policing discussion. In fact, the "off-topic" region of the guidelines would indicate this as well imo. But people have upvoted it to the front page, so there must be some interest at least. Best bet is probably to flag and move on.
The HN community is not magically immune to the flaws of online communities. There are always differing points of view, trolls, and warriors for a cause.
It is mildly disappointing. Not necessarily that this article is here but if an article were posted that is equally interesting yet coming from another political bent, it would be almost immediately marked [flagged] and hidden. Even if the article were interesting.
> The cameras are relatively simple to operate. They constantly record everything in front of them, but only save 30 seconds of video at a time. To record an entire incident, the officer must double press the “event” button in the center of the camera.
So non-compliance is the default.
And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the double-press has registered?
Agreed. I assumed they buffered the whole work day such that following an incident, the investigating officers (and not the officer under investigation) would initiate the persistence of a particular incident.
Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. 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.
Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
>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 key kept in memory, then store the encrypted video on non-volatile storage. You get best of both worlds.
>I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.
> 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 includes the past minute or 2, you can be reasonably sure it doesn't include something it shouldn't (such as a victim who asked not to be recorded from an hour ago). If hitting that button commits a 5 hour buffer, then you're going to have all kinds of stuff now "in the public record" that maybe shouldn't be there. But also you now have 5 hours of more or less useless video that you have to store and account for (which costs $).
> Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.
It's actually less about the storage and more about the bandwidth to transfer that data to the storage location. Though the cost of the storage itself can still be an issue even if you're only retaining it for 90-180 days.
There's a whole bunch of factors of course, but pick a reasonable bit rate (5-10 Mbps perhaps) for your recording and multiply it by the number of hours recorded per officer and the number of officers in an agency. Chicago PD has 12,000 police officers. I don't know how many of them work on a given day but let's say 10,000. Say each one records 5 hours per day based on the 5 hour buffer proposed here.
10,000 * 5 hours = 50,000 hours of footage per day
50,000 hours * 5 Mbps = 112.5 terabytes per day
112.5 terabytes uploaded in 24 hours = 10.4 Gbps
(you need to be able to upload a full day's recording within 24 hours or you'll never catch up)
Doing this quickly so hopefully my math isn't off but it's in line with what I remember. 10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud. 20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.
Sure, you can attack some of these numbers (not every officer will have a recordable interaction every day etc.) but I hope it gets the point across.
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.
> that works out to a 500 Mb/s link per building, which seems pretty modest for a institution
We're talking 500 Mb/s of upload 24/7 though, which can't be used for anything else (i.e. you need capacity beyond that for any other internet traffic). I doubt a regular old 1Gbps business class connection will cut it there (I'm sure they'd shut you off after a few days of uploading like that).
Despite another post that cited a large budget for NYPD, most agencies are cash-strapped. Telling them they need a $thousands/month internet connection at every precinct isn't going to go over well.
I've been to several PDs (think suburban city - probably like the majority of agencies) where their entire "internet infrastructure" consisted of a Comcast cable modem screwed to a sheet of plywood on a wall. Like I said elsewhere, most PDs are the opposite of high-tech - compared to most companies, their employees don't spend nearly as much time on computers or the internet.
That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.
> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
It's a lot, but it's really just a matter of funding. If there's money to be paid for the service that someone can make a profit on, someone will step in to offer that service. I think the amount of storage required is actually pretty close to the amount Youtube adds in content every day (if we assume not all of the 800k police officers are recording every day, and not all of them are out on the street with a need to record). That's a lot, but the requirements aren't quite the same (you could start at high quality and re-encode to lower quality at age intervals unless flagged as important) instead of encoding to many qualities initially. Additionally there wouldn't need to be nearly as much serving infrastructure as youtube. It's the sort of problem the Federal government could throw a couple billion at a year that went to departments through grants and we would pretty quickly have a competitive field of companies offering storage for this as a service. Managing the security of the data would definitely need some regulation though.
> That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.
If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this are, but as I understand it people have that right. That may not apply out in public but it seems to in private homes at least.
There are laws in some states about parties consenting to be recorded, I'm not sure how that interacts with the police and their recording, but my guess is that it's mostly untested until it hits a court or if specific exemptions exist or were added.
I understand and agree with people's need and right for privacy (although I'm not quite sure how the right interacts with this depending on who starts the interaction), but I think if HIPAA like stringency requirements were enacted on the data, with severe penalties, we could possibly hit a sweet spot where people had an expectation that their interaction videos would be private, and yet we could still rely on active monitoring by video of what those we've enabled with extra rights and abilities for the purpose of protecting us actually do, as a form of oversight.
> Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival.
Does it though? The source of all your objections here is that if body cameras had a 5 hour buffer, it's vitally important that buffer be saved even if nothing important happened. It's fine if you think that's true, but your alternative is to throw out all footage after a 30-second buffer unless an officer decides that they are in an important situation, implying that the footage missed is not important at all.
How about not offloading 5 hours of video if nothing happened? That's not somehow less honorable or ethical than never recording the video at all when you know, from endless examples, that the camera will often not be turned on in critical situations.
Hypothetically, all footage from an officer, when they're on-shift, could be of interest. And it's probably fair to say that state / the public have a right to that information for some purposes.
In the interest of sanity, I think we can suspend recording for personal moments:
- Bathroom
- Medical
- Break time (e.g. eating)
We can potentially switch to a lower-resolution / audio-only take for the vast majority of a shift. E.g. idling in a cruiser.
As someone else highlighted, what we absolutely want to record is:
- Use of weapon (holster switch)
- Conflict (volume trigger?)
- Immediately preceding interval before camera turned off (presumably, will contain a request / rationale to disable)
Effectively, what we want to do is switch from a trigger-on to a trigger-off. Cops shouldn't have to even think about cameras. They should just work.
Given that trucking companies routinely use dashcams with 12+ hours of continuous recording, and loads of shops routinely store days of CCTV from loads of cameras, I'm not sure I agree with your arguments that always-on bodycams aren't technically feasible.
> Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded.
Then make the recordings encrypted, and ONLY let the DA have the key that decrypts them. This solves the lack of data problem, but it also prevents the police from using their own footage without authorization.
> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day.
You don't have to save full quality video indefinitely. After several days, remove all color from the video. After several more, reduce the frame rate. After several more, reduce the resolution. If you built your system carefully, you could save much more video than people tend to estimate.
Beyond that.. there is a statue of limitations. I expect the police to keep their body cam recordings for up to 90 days, beyond that, unless they're directly related to a case, they should be allowed to reclaim that storage.
I've been saying this for a while now and I think encryption is the solution to the problem.
Instead of having an "Off" button, make the button begin ciphering the data with an officers private key. If the courts discover that there is something of interest in the duration of time that the camera is encrypting, they can compel the officer to turn over her encryption key or face a contempt charge.
This would allow either side (prosecution or defendant) to bring an argument forward and to have a judge decide if there's enough merit to warrant a decryption of the recording.
> Then make the recordings encrypted, and ONLY let the DA have the key that decrypts them. This solves the lack of data problem, but it also prevents the police from using their own footage without authorization.
Unfortunately, That doesn't work.
Police officers, supervisors, and internal affairs often need to refer back to recording when making or reviewing police reports. Body cam and dash cam videos often need to be shared internally or externally. Also, many precincts take random samples of body camera footage and do spot check reviews to make sure officers are behaving in line with policy.
There are tons of people who need access to body cam footage on a regular basis.
> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD
40,000 officers (rounded up)
8 hours of full HD video can be stored in 10 gigs of storage
do this 365 days a year for every officer
S3 standard costs less than 3 cents per gigabyte to store per month
result: about 50 million dollars to store 8 hours of FHD video of every officer every day for a year
The NYPD anual budget is 5 billion dollars. Thus, storing all this video would cost about 1% of the budget. I've made generous roundings in favor of overestimating this cost, and in reality it would be much less.
I'm not proposing you store it on S3, but I used the price of S3 standard as a cost estimate. In reality I expect you could get the cost to be much less (I mean, even S3 standard is closer to 2 cents than the 3 cents I quoted) with on-premises storage. You also wouldn't need every minute of every video instantly available like you would get with S3 standard, further reducing costs.
I had a hard time finding the bandwidth costs, but since you've done the math already, I'd like to hear what you came up with.
AWS has hard drives that they can send you empty and you fill em up and send them back for upload to S3. They even have semi trucks full of hard drives that will drive to you: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
Reverse it and add penalties & an assumption of adding reasonable doubt. E.g. cop can press button before going piss. Press it again to turn it back on.
But if they pull someone over, press the stop button that either has penalty or minimally should have mandatory 'shadow of a doubt' implications
Storage is so cheap I believe it's silly we don't have this. And top down to force local muni's who's citizens support police violence and biased over policing.
But unfortunately it doesn't even matter yet there are so many police who have clearly committed crimes/murder/manslaughter that was caught on camera without large/any consequences
> Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded
Easily solvable. At a single press of a button they can temporarily turn off the camera for 15 minutes at a time. At a double press it is turned off for 30 minutes.
Now if a cop says the camera was turned off while doing official business, it was turned off on purpose and they no longer have an "excuse" that they forgot to turn it on.
it's a common sort of outcome for most attempts at police reform in the USA - buying the police bodycams are one of many "obvious" fixes that somehow don't work
your link is just condensed talking points for people who already support the abolish position. I don't see how it could "level up" anyone's thinking, particularly someone who is wondering whether they should support abolition to begin with.
I don’t know why we accept this. It would be easy to make it so if an officer failed to turn on their body cam, and a complaint was filed (which should buffer an entire shift, or at least an hour or so), the presumption is there was misconduct and the officer should be fired, and possibly tried for criminal charges. If I failed to take appropriate records of my job, or fulfil my duties (esp if my job were safety critical), and a complaint was lodged, I’d be out the door.
Unfortunately filing complaints in Chicago doesn't result in discipline towards on officer. If a complaint is sustained by COPA (the agency responsible for accepting and investigating complaints) then COPA gets to make a "recommendation" to the Chicago Police Department with how to discipline the officer involved. It is then up to CPD whether they want to actually follow that recommendation or not. A separate but related issues is that officers also don't always oblige to requests for their identification in the event of an altercation.
Chicago 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?
If government wants to continue with drug prohibition then they should provide adequate policing. You can't have a cake and eat it too. You cannot blame the environment if this is what you created. If police cannot handle gangs, then why don't they lobby for drug legalisation? Or is it that they quite enjoy drug busts and undeclared cash on the side?
This is textbook whataboutism and the answer as always is that one problem's existence doesn't preclude the treatment of another. How about we address both problems? This article is talking about the police problem.
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.
If you want community investment try not burning and looting every mom & pop store next time you peacefully protest whatever injustice is trending that day on Twitter.
It's beyond incredible that we allow a "no knock warrant" (e.g. Breonna Taylor) with police that have body cams, yet there is no standard practice that says a senior officer must ensure they are operating and recording BEFORE they begin.
One of the larger data points is deep into this (very lengthy) story: an estimated 10% of stops that are mandated to be recorded (e.g. not conducted by officers in specialized teams that don't operate with cameras) were marked by officers as not having body camera footage. That doesn't include incidents – such as the story's main anecdote – in which officers claim there is footage even when there isn't, or much of it is missing.
> CBS 2 obtained data on more than 340,000 of those stops between the start of 2018 — the first full year all patrol officers had body cameras — and June 30, 2020.
> More than 62,000 stops during that period didn't have body camera video, the data showed.
> About half of the interactions that weren’t recorded involved police officers who are not required by policy to wear body cameras, including those on specialized teams.
> In order to find out how many stops were potential policy violations, CBS 2 isolated stops made by cops who would normally wear body cameras. It shows about 34,000 stops — roughly 10 percent — were made by officers not assigned to gang, gun or saturation teams.
I'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
I've long been advocating prison abolition, a component of which is police abolition. When discussing such matters I often will ask people what measurable line in the sand must be crossed for them to believe sweeping systemic change is necessary. My anecdotal findings are that either people will set the bar absurdly high, meaning that they believe the only circumstance that requires system change is an active mass extermination program targeting a majority of the population or they will place the bar far below where we currently are now but then refuse to listen to any evidence that we have actually far surpassed that threshold, usually presenting an endless stream of weak, easily refuted arguments.
Even if they turn them on, many body cams in use store the files locally on an SD card with no authentication or verification of chain of custody, just flat video files. It is trivial to wipe evidence from these Axon cameras especially - https://github.com/xraymemory/haxon
my 2 cents: anyone who even thinks of defunding the police should visit a country with no police (for example a favella in Rio at night) and report back their results. The experiment will likely not be very repeatable.
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 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.
While in general I agree with the idea of debating the strongest version of your opponent's ideas, I think it's okay to call out a clear motte-and-bailey when you see one, and require the other team to come back with a sensibly-phrased proposition to debate.
If you tell me "We should kill all the Jews, and by 'Kill all the Jews' obviously I mean that we should increase capital gains tax by two percent" then I'm not going to debate capital gains tax with you, I'm going to tell you to go away and come back when you stop using words in such a deliberately ridiculous way.
> anyone who even thinks of defunding the police should visit a country with no police (for example a favella in Rio at night)
Rio has police. The fact that they choose not to act against crime in certain cases in certain areas (and are extremely likely to act brutally against suspects from those areas in other cases) is, actually, quite parallel to the problems that underly the defund/abolish movements in the US.
But neither the defund nor even the abolish movements want there to be no law enforcement, they just want (in the defund cases) resources and peripheral responsibilities stripped from law enforcement agencies and given to more appropriate alternative agencies, or (in the abolish case) local community services, especially law enforcement, to be redesigned and radically restructured, with no 1:1 replacement for the existing main law enforcement agency (but, in virtually all cases, with the law enforcement function retained in new entities.)
Body cams are an expensive diversion that tries to use technology to solve a legal, procedural problem. HN loves them, because hey, there are interesting technical questions about their deployment, but they accomplish nearly nothing.
The real issue is that even when police impropriety is discovered, with mountains of evidence to support it, oversight bodies have no ability to censure the officers involved.
In Seattle, for example, the civilian oversight office offers non-binding disciplinary suggestions to the only body that can discipline police officers - their union. Unsurprisingly, the union takes those non-binding suggestions, and puts them right into the paper shredder. On the county level, until quite recently, the oversight organization couldn't even subpoena records from the sheriff's department - it would ask the department to turn over records, and the department would kindly tell them to go pound sand.
The only other form of oversight is raising a criminal case against the officer involved. Because of the discretionary nature of prosecution in this country, and because of a huge conflict of interest, where 99% of the time, prosecutors work in tandem with the police, prosecutions are frequently sabotaged for political reasons. (See the Breonna Taylor indictment - where the prosecutor deliberately sabotaged the case he presented to the grand jury.)
And on top of that, the bar for a criminal conviction of a police officer is astronomically high.
No amount of body camera technology is going to fix either of those three problems.
As 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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadedit Will add context. Police oversight will always be a totally unbalanced fight for power. Police obviously do not want their behavior analyzed because of the obvious and frequent abuse of that power. For some reason, lots of america believes that being a police officer should come with total unchecked power amongst their communities - even so much as scrutinizing their use of excessive force has become a politicized nightmare.
So no, it is in no way surprising that police oversight is garbage and continues to give police easy outs.
The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavoidable.
Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets.
Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response.
A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy.
This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.
Building a camp out in the desert somewhere where people like this can get three square meals and a bed would both be an improvement on their present situation and a total money saver once you take into account all the problems and waste of police/ambulance time that they cause. Even better if you extend it to drug addicts.
If the police are substandard it means we need to pay them more to get better quality applicants into the system.
We also need a better funded prison/drug rehab system so that police don't have to waste their time dealing with the sort of habitual offenders who should have been permanently removed from society a long time ago.
There's no indication that funding is an actual problem that a lot of these "bad" departments face. Teachers regularly have to buy their own supplies for their classrooms. Have you ever heard of a cop needing pay out of their own pocket for ammo for their service weapon, gas for their patrol car, or batteries for their radios?
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 with people's jobs and livelihood through bail/fines, and more money to go to schools, which they see as helping a community and providing beneficial services.
But the problem here isn't one that we can solve with tech alone. It's cultural to the institution of policing.
It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes.
That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.
It shouldn't surprise you that few people will choose monitoring beyond what's legally required.
This has already been around for a few years https://www.axon.com/products/axon-signal-sidearm, not sure about adoption numbers though
Exactly what is needed.
My personal philosophy is that if called to be on a criminal jury, if the case relies on the officer's testimony and there is no camera, I will return a verdict of not guilty under the justification that the state has failed to prove its case.
A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
It’s a huge problem.
In my case the guy was (as best I could conclude) legitimately guilty of one of the lesser included charges, but there was some dodgy testimony, and I was the only one, in my group, to question it, and suggest that it might have some bearing on which of the many charges that might actually make him guilty of. It took quite some convincing to get anyone else to drop to anything lower than the top charge.
While I realize that this sample size of 1 is statistically insignificant, it really seems like if you wind up in court on criminal charges, odds seem to be you're screwed. "Innocent until proven guilty" felt, to me, like a pipedream.
As a jury we ended up deciding that the defendant was Not Guilty because without that filed paperwork, it was just two people's recollection of the events and we didn't feel the officer was more trustworthy.
I wouldn't have thought much about it after the fact, except that the prosecution was visibly upset at the decision which made me realize that that was likely not what normally would have happened.
I'm cynical enough about lawyers (having seen a few in action) that I wonder if "visibly upset" wasn't trying to manipulate someone - either the judge, or the jury members in case they serve on a jury again some day.
There's a reason that DUI defendants almost universally request jury trials.
And if their camera is off they lose their insurance policy. Then no more access to qualified immunity.
Being police is a luxury not a right.
//side note, FDR agreed.... which is ironic given that most people that support Public Employee unions think we need a new new deal FDR style
It's a service, not a luxury.
Money is fungible. Even if the union doesn’t negotiate this insurance on a group level, passing along the premium could be quite easily baked into contract negotiations.
Not saying it's a good scheme just that there's more at play than just money.
They could purchase, maintain the body cameras, collect and handle the footage and be trusted.
If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.
I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's my understanding the Seattle PD are under some sort of probation system with the DOJ, which I'm guessing the FBI was involved with. So I think this sort of thing does happen, though I guess not enough.
They have a certain amount of ability to do that if the state or local government is violating Federal law. But they do not have general oversight or police powers, since the Federal government as a whole does not. Nor is it supposed to.
Aside from activating / deactivating the camera (with clear guidelines and penalties for doing / not doing so), and connecting it to a network at the end of a shift, it should be a black box. None of the IT functions should run out of the same police force.
Consequently, this also protects officers in the case of equipment failure: timestamp the activation / deactivation signals in a separate log file. If the footage isn't there, but they activated, then it's no longer their reputation on the line, because they had no involvement in the chain of custody.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_bureau_of_investigation
I agree it should be a black box. Rule #1 for accountability is that you don't rely on the entity that's being examined to give absolutely correct info. Whether that's debugging a process or reviewing an organization, outside instrumentation is essential.
Not... entirely accurate.
Many states possess their own military forces [0], and state National Guard units are dual-chained to both state and national military leadership [1] (in different scenarios).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force#Active_sta...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Guard#N...
If only a significant % of america didn't refuse to acknowledge police abuse of power was a big deal (or even happening)
It would also help if police were not tasked with enforcing a litany of nanny state laws that shouldn't even be on the books to begin with. Any cop that wants to mess with a citizen can always find some excuse; with all the laws we have, all of us are violating some law every day.
Moreover corrupt cops thrive because of close knit relationships between local DAs, local law enforcement, local judges and local politicians. A national wrecking ball is needed to break these toxic corrupt relationships and a strong, national institution is needed to create the institutional inertia against systemic police corruption from arising again.
You can't vote corruption out of office. It has to be rooted out from outside. Even the cleanest politicians cannot operate from within a corrupt system.
The US is a union of states. Although we have a pretty massive and powerful federal government, many things are the responsibility of the states and the federal government has limited ability to intervene. Using the FBI is one of the avenues I believe though.
In other words, if the corruption is not just particular localities, but infects the national government as well, then we're all screwed?
They get stuck with it because 1st world countries insist on continuing to send aid even though the corrupt governments take all of it and it never benefits the people. Not to mention 1st world countries giving legitimacy to those corrupt governments in many other ways.
In other words, on a global level, the idea that corruption in 3rd world countries is "a global problem" has made the corruption worse, not better.
"Let local residents handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws.
Bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a second symptom
Apathetic electorates electing bad officials unwilling to prosecute bad cops is a third symptom
Municipalities spread all around the country are suffering from the same combination of symptoms. Whether that suggests one national problem or the same local problem in replicate is a question of semantics.
No, "let Democratic State governments of the Southern states handle it" was how America went through Jim Crow laws. Localities would never have gotten away with it if the State governments had not supported them and helped them crack down on local citizens who pushed back.
Well, no, we nationally have gay marriage because of federal court decisions voiding state actions prohibiting same-sex marriage as violations of the federal Constitution.
And we don't have legal marijuana anywhere in the United States (we have states which have chosen not to layer state prohibition on top of federal prohibition for some acts involving marijuana, an federal law mandating deferring prosecution for certain acts involving medical marijuana that are consistent with state law. Anyone who actually makes significant money in marijuana would still be subject to the federal drug kingpin laws were the policy deferring prosecution ever to be lifted, and technically without that if any part of their business involved any acts not entirely within the required deferral of prosecution.)
I apologize, but I don't quite get how you arrived at the conclusion you have, specifically this point. Help me out here?
> 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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
This isn’t to say that federal policies don’t also have issues. If we think something is a right of all citizens (Such as to not be subject to abuse by the police), that only really takes hold if it is applied across the nation, which is federal.
For example, if I live in a small town that where 80% of the people intent their C code with tabs and I use spaces, they could theoretically elect a police chief who espouses tabs-jingoism and treats spaces-programmers less fairly.
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.
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, that if the corrupt local cops are violating state or federal law, they're still liable even if a majority of local voters are ok with it. I don't have a problem with, for example, local cops being prosecuted for violating a citizen's Constitutional rights.
However, I strongly doubt that a majority of voters in these localities are actually ok with police corruption. I think they either don't bother voting because they don't think it will make any difference, or don't know about the corruption because they haven't personally experienced the consequences. Even in a large city like, e.g., Chicago, the majority of voters will never have a personal encounter with a city cop.
> going to a couple levels in governance (state or federal) makes total sense given the systematic nature of some of the problems
You're assuming that the state and federal levels of government don't also have systematic problems that would prevent them from fixing corruption. That strikes me as a highly unlikely assumption.
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.
Overall, no. But the overall averages conceal a huge variation in risk by locality. I agree that "it's a dangerous job" doesn't excuse shooting innocent people or their pets. But the danger of the job in particular localities should not be underestimated.
> Changing their mentality from a warrior to a guardian also does wonders in lowering use of force.
Can you give specific examples? I agree with the general idea but I have not seen much actual data on specific localities where this is done or what effect it has.
> almost half the country think those who got shot by police probably deserved it
Citation needed.
> Almost the same crowd protests wearing masks as stepping on their liberties.
The protest is not against wearing masks where it makes sense to do so; it's against being ordered to wear masks whether it makes sense or not, and subjecting people to criminal penalties for non-compliance. For example, according to some orders (fortunately for me, not the one currently in effect where I live), you are subject to arrest for simply walking out your front door without a mask on, even if you remain on your own property and nobody else comes anywhere near you.
And don't forget that the same cops whose corruption and lack of judgment you and I both deplore will be the ones to enforce these orders. Frankly, it strikes me as illogical for people to be talking about defunding the police on the grounds of corruption on the one hand, and talking about issuing draconian orders that would have to be enforced by those same police on the other.
I wish more people understood that the reason the USA was set up the way it was was to allow individual States and localities to compete. Corruption doesn't stand up well to competitive pressure: if all the productive people leave your town because the cops and the local government shake everybody down, your town won't survive. So where you see corruption, the first question you should ask is: what barriers are being put in the way of people just leaving?
This "solution" is exactly what created the troubles of inner cities to begin with.
How much did they buy them for in the first place if the place is corrupt and everyone is trying to get out?
If the place became corrupt after all those people moved there, well, whose fault is that? If your answer is "corrupt politicians and corporations who took advantage of the people", well, there's your barrier to free and open competition between localities.
> This "solution" is exactly what created the troubles of inner cities to begin with.
No, what created the troubles of inner cities was completely unrealistic political expectations. People thought that using the government to fix social problems was a wonderful idea. Inner cities today are tragic evidence of how wrong they were.
I think what would be more powerful would be to empower citizens to bring criminal cases against police offers acting in their official capacity. Then at least we could be assured that the prosecutors are motivated to win the case for their clients.
In a national department? You get to the top by putting dirty cops in jail. Your boss's boss does not need to maintain an good relationship with a judge in Georgia. They win in their career by putting more dirty cops in jail.
The more national and centralized and separate from the rest of the police a department like this is the more ruthless it can be.
I reject the idea that all problems have a national solutions, which this seems to be a part of.
Federalism is good, and we should not continue the path of destruction of our federalist society
The closest thing (and its fairly close, though it doesn't answer to the states or the President directly) is the US Department of Justice, particularly the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, which addresses "1) the rights of people in state or local institutions, including: jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and health care facilities for persons with disabilities; 2) the rights of individuals with disabilities to receive services in their communities, rather than in institutions; 3) the rights of people who interact with state or local police or sheriffs' departments; 4) the rights of youth involved in the juvenile justice system; 5) the rights of people to have safe access to reproductive health care clinics; and 6) the rights of people to practice their religion while confined to state and local institutions." [0]
But weakening oversight of local law enforcement by DoJ was a major early priority of the current Administration, so it hasn't been particularly active in the particular role you are concerned with for the last few years.
> If Biden is looking to score some points this would be a good way.
I can't really imagine a Biden Administration not ramping activity regarding law enforcement oversight back up.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/crt/special-litigation-section
A couple of hung juries and prosecutors will be sure to start asking this specific question in order to strike you from the jury. They already do this for the death penalty.
If wearing a body camera is a requirement of the job then the penalty for not doing so should be the same as the penalty for not doing any other aspect of your job, you get fired.
If they don't exceed the penalty for being caught in a particular instance of wrong doing, then it's not likely to be effective in those cases.. which are likely to be the most important of these cases.
> A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
DAs are elected. Let them know they shouldn't even bring these cases, or you're going to unseat them for even trying a single one.
We shouldn't rely on the long tail of justice to save us here, we need protections at every level of the system. Peoples lives hang in the balance during a trial, why should we chance it?
While you cannot remove QI you can probably get away with unpaid leave when an officer is under investigation but I expect that to eventually get overturned by union activity.
Politically its radioactive, note the choices made on both sides for candidates and who got to speak at their relative conventions. If anything we will see increased funding for police with the typical wording to make it sound like we asked for it.
Yes we know they’re bad/unethical and a problem for Americans. But is this really something that “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”?
Isn’t it just flamebait now?
So non-compliance is the default.
And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the double-press has registered?
Why not buffer 5 hours by default?
But seriously, I would imagine the storage costs aren’t that terrible relative to the costs it would save in lawsuits for the police departments ?
Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. 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.
Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
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.
>I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.
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 includes the past minute or 2, you can be reasonably sure it doesn't include something it shouldn't (such as a victim who asked not to be recorded from an hour ago). If hitting that button commits a 5 hour buffer, then you're going to have all kinds of stuff now "in the public record" that maybe shouldn't be there. But also you now have 5 hours of more or less useless video that you have to store and account for (which costs $).
> Mind showing your calculations? Keep in mind you don't have to store the videos in perpetuity. Limiting it to 180 days (with option to extend if the incident is being disputed) would suffice for most cases.
It's actually less about the storage and more about the bandwidth to transfer that data to the storage location. Though the cost of the storage itself can still be an issue even if you're only retaining it for 90-180 days.
There's a whole bunch of factors of course, but pick a reasonable bit rate (5-10 Mbps perhaps) for your recording and multiply it by the number of hours recorded per officer and the number of officers in an agency. Chicago PD has 12,000 police officers. I don't know how many of them work on a given day but let's say 10,000. Say each one records 5 hours per day based on the 5 hour buffer proposed here.
10,000 * 5 hours = 50,000 hours of footage per day
50,000 hours * 5 Mbps = 112.5 terabytes per day
112.5 terabytes uploaded in 24 hours = 10.4 Gbps
(you need to be able to upload a full day's recording within 24 hours or you'll never catch up)
Doing this quickly so hopefully my math isn't off but it's in line with what I remember. 10Gbps being uploaded 24/7 to the cloud. 20 petabytes stored at any moment if you're holding everything for 180 days.
Sure, you can attack some of these numbers (not every officer will have a recordable interaction every day etc.) but I hope it gets the point across.
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.
We're talking 500 Mb/s of upload 24/7 though, which can't be used for anything else (i.e. you need capacity beyond that for any other internet traffic). I doubt a regular old 1Gbps business class connection will cut it there (I'm sure they'd shut you off after a few days of uploading like that).
Despite another post that cited a large budget for NYPD, most agencies are cash-strapped. Telling them they need a $thousands/month internet connection at every precinct isn't going to go over well.
I've been to several PDs (think suburban city - probably like the majority of agencies) where their entire "internet infrastructure" consisted of a Comcast cable modem screwed to a sheet of plywood on a wall. Like I said elsewhere, most PDs are the opposite of high-tech - compared to most companies, their employees don't spend nearly as much time on computers or the internet.
That's an interesting point, but I'm not sure this specific case matters? Are there things a person speaking to a police officer has any expectation that the officer may not relay as said to them? I would rather have it always recorded and strong laws about it's accessed.
> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
It's a lot, but it's really just a matter of funding. If there's money to be paid for the service that someone can make a profit on, someone will step in to offer that service. I think the amount of storage required is actually pretty close to the amount Youtube adds in content every day (if we assume not all of the 800k police officers are recording every day, and not all of them are out on the street with a need to record). That's a lot, but the requirements aren't quite the same (you could start at high quality and re-encode to lower quality at age intervals unless flagged as important) instead of encoding to many qualities initially. Additionally there wouldn't need to be nearly as much serving infrastructure as youtube. It's the sort of problem the Federal government could throw a couple billion at a year that went to departments through grants and we would pretty quickly have a competitive field of companies offering storage for this as a service. Managing the security of the data would definitely need some regulation though.
If you watch the Jussie Smollet video he requested that officers turn off the cameras and they did so. I have no idea what the laws around this are, but as I understand it people have that right. That may not apply out in public but it seems to in private homes at least.
I understand and agree with people's need and right for privacy (although I'm not quite sure how the right interacts with this depending on who starts the interaction), but I think if HIPAA like stringency requirements were enacted on the data, with severe penalties, we could possibly hit a sweet spot where people had an expectation that their interaction videos would be private, and yet we could still rely on active monitoring by video of what those we've enabled with extra rights and abilities for the purpose of protecting us actually do, as a form of oversight.
Does it though? The source of all your objections here is that if body cameras had a 5 hour buffer, it's vitally important that buffer be saved even if nothing important happened. It's fine if you think that's true, but your alternative is to throw out all footage after a 30-second buffer unless an officer decides that they are in an important situation, implying that the footage missed is not important at all.
How about not offloading 5 hours of video if nothing happened? That's not somehow less honorable or ethical than never recording the video at all when you know, from endless examples, that the camera will often not be turned on in critical situations.
In the interest of sanity, I think we can suspend recording for personal moments: - Bathroom - Medical - Break time (e.g. eating)
We can potentially switch to a lower-resolution / audio-only take for the vast majority of a shift. E.g. idling in a cruiser.
As someone else highlighted, what we absolutely want to record is: - Use of weapon (holster switch) - Conflict (volume trigger?) - Immediately preceding interval before camera turned off (presumably, will contain a request / rationale to disable)
Effectively, what we want to do is switch from a trigger-on to a trigger-off. Cops shouldn't have to even think about cameras. They should just work.
Then make the recordings encrypted, and ONLY let the DA have the key that decrypts them. This solves the lack of data problem, but it also prevents the police from using their own footage without authorization.
> Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day.
You don't have to save full quality video indefinitely. After several days, remove all color from the video. After several more, reduce the frame rate. After several more, reduce the resolution. If you built your system carefully, you could save much more video than people tend to estimate.
Beyond that.. there is a statue of limitations. I expect the police to keep their body cam recordings for up to 90 days, beyond that, unless they're directly related to a case, they should be allowed to reclaim that storage.
Instead of having an "Off" button, make the button begin ciphering the data with an officers private key. If the courts discover that there is something of interest in the duration of time that the camera is encrypting, they can compel the officer to turn over her encryption key or face a contempt charge.
This would allow either side (prosecution or defendant) to bring an argument forward and to have a judge decide if there's enough merit to warrant a decryption of the recording.
Unfortunately, That doesn't work.
Police officers, supervisors, and internal affairs often need to refer back to recording when making or reviewing police reports. Body cam and dash cam videos often need to be shared internally or externally. Also, many precincts take random samples of body camera footage and do spot check reviews to make sure officers are behaving in line with policy.
There are tons of people who need access to body cam footage on a regular basis.
40,000 officers (rounded up)
8 hours of full HD video can be stored in 10 gigs of storage
do this 365 days a year for every officer
S3 standard costs less than 3 cents per gigabyte to store per month
result: about 50 million dollars to store 8 hours of FHD video of every officer every day for a year
The NYPD anual budget is 5 billion dollars. Thus, storing all this video would cost about 1% of the budget. I've made generous roundings in favor of overestimating this cost, and in reality it would be much less.
I had a hard time finding the bandwidth costs, but since you've done the math already, I'd like to hear what you came up with.
But if they pull someone over, press the stop button that either has penalty or minimally should have mandatory 'shadow of a doubt' implications
Storage is so cheap I believe it's silly we don't have this. And top down to force local muni's who's citizens support police violence and biased over policing.
But unfortunately it doesn't even matter yet there are so many police who have clearly committed crimes/murder/manslaughter that was caught on camera without large/any consequences
Easily solvable. At a single press of a button they can temporarily turn off the camera for 15 minutes at a time. At a double press it is turned off for 30 minutes.
Now if a cop says the camera was turned off while doing official business, it was turned off on purpose and they no longer have an "excuse" that they forgot to turn it on.
"woops - accidentally shot someone for no reason. Better press save on the body camera so I can be prosecuted/sacked!"
Body cameras are not marketed to police departments as instruments that keep cops honest.
They're marketed as instruments that keep people from falsely accusing cops of crimes in court.
Cops just want body cameras that they can turn on only when they feel like they might get a raw deal, and that's exactly what they bought.
This is educational if you are interested in leveling up your thinking on it https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...
Source: Chicago resident who has filed complaints
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [1] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-murders-2020-crime-fbi/64317...
> CBS 2 obtained data on more than 340,000 of those stops between the start of 2018 — the first full year all patrol officers had body cameras — and June 30, 2020.
> More than 62,000 stops during that period didn't have body camera video, the data showed.
> About half of the interactions that weren’t recorded involved police officers who are not required by policy to wear body cameras, including those on specialized teams.
> In order to find out how many stops were potential policy violations, CBS 2 isolated stops made by cops who would normally wear body cameras. It shows about 34,000 stops — roughly 10 percent — were made by officers not assigned to gang, gun or saturation teams.
If only there was some sort of sign that these people can't be trusted.
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.
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 tell me "We should kill all the Jews, and by 'Kill all the Jews' obviously I mean that we should increase capital gains tax by two percent" then I'm not going to debate capital gains tax with you, I'm going to tell you to go away and come back when you stop using words in such a deliberately ridiculous way.
Rio has police. The fact that they choose not to act against crime in certain cases in certain areas (and are extremely likely to act brutally against suspects from those areas in other cases) is, actually, quite parallel to the problems that underly the defund/abolish movements in the US.
But neither the defund nor even the abolish movements want there to be no law enforcement, they just want (in the defund cases) resources and peripheral responsibilities stripped from law enforcement agencies and given to more appropriate alternative agencies, or (in the abolish case) local community services, especially law enforcement, to be redesigned and radically restructured, with no 1:1 replacement for the existing main law enforcement agency (but, in virtually all cases, with the law enforcement function retained in new entities.)
The real issue is that even when police impropriety is discovered, with mountains of evidence to support it, oversight bodies have no ability to censure the officers involved.
In Seattle, for example, the civilian oversight office offers non-binding disciplinary suggestions to the only body that can discipline police officers - their union. Unsurprisingly, the union takes those non-binding suggestions, and puts them right into the paper shredder. On the county level, until quite recently, the oversight organization couldn't even subpoena records from the sheriff's department - it would ask the department to turn over records, and the department would kindly tell them to go pound sand.
The only other form of oversight is raising a criminal case against the officer involved. Because of the discretionary nature of prosecution in this country, and because of a huge conflict of interest, where 99% of the time, prosecutors work in tandem with the police, prosecutions are frequently sabotaged for political reasons. (See the Breonna Taylor indictment - where the prosecutor deliberately sabotaged the case he presented to the grand jury.)
And on top of that, the bar for a criminal conviction of a police officer is astronomically high.
No amount of body camera technology is going to fix either of those three problems.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-11...