I only skimmed the article but the discussion on how police body cam footage is released should be had.
On the one hand, I would like the footage to be fully released but what about instances similar to people being swatted[0]? Surly there should be limits in place but can we really trust police to be ethical?
Hopefully more people comment but surely there will be more of these types of articles written in the future as body cams continue to roll out.
I think most people would agree that the video should come into evidence if someone ends up dead. Also, most people would agree that videos should not all be released publicly. But there are a lot of difficult situations between those two extremes.
Even if the rules about releasing footage are quite restricted, I think body cameras will influence the behavior of police. Not always for the better necessarily, but I think they will reduce the number of fatal police shootings.
Fundamentally, they are people. Maybe even more importantly, crime doesn't just happen nonstop all the time everywhere. How many of us spend time at work not working? If every one of your smoke breaks, trips to hn, and other assorted breaks were recorded, I'm sure a damning case could be made against you the next time you're up for review. You don't think that would have political implications? I can't think of all the out comes that could have.
Likewise, I'll tell a personal story. I tend to drive fast. I've not had many tickets but I've had a few. Two really cool police gave me warnings a handful of years back instead of tickets; not just a warning but they reminded me of the car seat in the back, my family and suggested I slow down to be safer. It had a dramatic impact, I'd just get pissed off and pay a ticket but the warning, that they chose to give, stuck with me more and I've slowed down. Could that be done by a robot police officer that never takes breaks and follows the law literally and letter by letter? What if those cops had a record of giving certain races warnings but came down hard on other races?
im not against body cameras, especially in the current world of paramilitary style police, but it seems like there is a need for some human wisdom on a case by case basis here. Simple fixes could easily have some bad outcomes.
Most good cops I know _are_ in favor of body cameras. However... I think it's pretty reasonable to have some reservations... How would you feel about wearing a camera that would allow your supervisor to view absolutely everything you did during the day (sans bathroom breaks)?
Is there good reason for the videos to be public record? Why not have our judicial system decide/review police video on a case-by-case basis, rather than having them be public records?
A defendant should be innocent until proven guilty -- and those videos apply just as well. Is the police video for or against you? The court should decide.
If the video is "missing", a outside authority should investigate and weight should be given to the possibility that evidence was tampered with by the police. The public should demand this just as we have body-cameras.
There's a real-world problem seeking a solution, video that is verifiably stored (in multiple places) and encrypted but accessible via the judiciary when a court order allows it. It's not that the pieces aren't there, but rather that someone would need to package it well and sell it to local governments.
I can say as a matter of fact that the body camera system being implemented by the LAPD works exactly as you suggest. This is one of the reasons why it's taking so long to implement. Many people don't realize how important it is for a system like this to be implemented properly the first time.
Because many (most?) of the classes of people most victimised by police are in no financial position to instigate a court case just to find out if the cops bodycam footage show him beating/tasing their son/father/brother.
I was impressed by the way this article introduced the relevant issues without getting caught up in trying to give simple solutions.
Because body cams will capture footage of victims and associates and bystanders, as well as perpetrators and officers, there's an inherent tension between protecting the privacy of everyone in a video and allowing those in the video to see the captured footage of themselves. Every "simple" solution I can think of (including all of the ones described in the article), I can easily envision scenarios where that proposed solution would seem to be inappropriate.
I suspect the way we handle police body cam videos will be a point of contentious debate for another decade or more.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Video of bystanders? So what? Shouldn't we be outraged about other public cameras as well that the police use to catch criminals then? Don't people who film the police also film "bystanders"?
I think at the very least if the videos are kept secret until judicial review, then the police officers should be forced to keep them on all the time during work hours. The videos should also be automatically uploaded somewhere where that police department can't control what happens to the videos.
Police often get calls about domestic disputes that require them to go inside houses. Would you want a video from inside your house to have to be made available to the public by law?
Even if the "one-size-fits-all philosophy" about this doesn't work, it could still be regulated in a way where most of the video is public. Cop responds to a domestic issue and knocks on the door? He records himself prior to that in front of the door saying he will close the camera for that next action.
SWAT team about to enter a home or use a "no-knock" warrant? They aren't allowed to turn off the camera there. Same for the vast majority of the other police actions that happen in public.
Unfortunately, I'm sure the cops will find some loopholes to abuse this, too, and turn off the cameras when they aren't supposed to, especially if nobody ever punishes cops for such actions (which they don't), but I'd probably still take that over making all footage private by default. In many cases the cops doing bad things would still get caught because they forgot to turn off the camera or didn't think ahead to do it.
If the cameras can be turned off, they will be turned off whenever some bad cop wants to do something he or she does not want to be on record. So the cameras will not be useful.
Either the cameras are on all the time, or you can forget about them.
Or you let the cops know that unexpectedly missing footage will be interpreted as strongly confirming of accusations against them.
And then back that up with career advancement metrics designed to motivate individual cops to ensure their camera gear is working and reliable. Missing 2% of your bodycam footage a week without having made a documented effort to get it repaired/replaced is a warnable offence. Missing more than 5% you get your pay docked. Miss 5% more than twice in a calendar year is a sackable offence. Any claims made in court about events that happen while your bodycam footage is unavailable remove your usual police department protection, and expose you to civil suits that you're normally shielded from. If a civil suit rules that "in the balance of probabilities" you were wrong, you become personally exposed to damages.
As the law & order types love to say "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to fear." It cuts both ways.
Cameras can malfunction. Buttons do malfunction. Having unexpected missing footage will be perfectly normal if there is a button that is used for breaks etc, because the police will have a reasonable explanation for why the button press didn't register (like "I was having a donut break, I was stepping out of the car, it looked as if someone was pulling a gun, and at the same time the police radio reported of a warning of an armed suspect, I could not stop there to confirm that the camera went on, I just ducked behind the car.")
There's a wider culture issue with American police organisations, and my understanding is that the situation varies wildly across different states and cities. I don't think that adding complex camera usage rules will help a lot.
I'm not American, and in my country of 5.5 million people the police use the gun about 50 times a year; in this context, pointing gun at someone counts as "using" the gun and needs to be reported. In 2013 the police fired six bullets (training shots are obviously not counted, but warning shots are).
And that six bullets is not per one policeman, they are for the entire police force of 7800 police officers.
And yes, the general public here has almost as many firearms per capita as the Americans do. It's just a different culture. Not one without violence or homicide, but still quite different, from the police point of view.
It's not a complex rule. If you're an officer, have a camera, and you have been accused of wrongdoing, then summary dismissal of the charges will not be possible if the footage is absent.
Have you given any thought to the implications of wearing a camera for 8-12 hours a day? Cops need to use the bathroom too... Body cameras will always need to have the ability to be turned off.
Of course this is a real problem. But if the camera can be turned off, then it will not be recording all bad behaviour, because the policeman can turn it off when he wants to (and then, instead of going to the bathroom, he can shoot someone).
I'd say it should only be public when used as part of a court case (introduced as evidence by either party), with the juries instructed that they may draw adverse inferences if the video goes missing for any reason (i.e. losing the tape is automatically suspect).
The rest of the time it should be kept and unwatched. Ideally, I also think it would be best if everyone had to give sworn statements before they knew what was or wasn't on video (so nobody gets to change stories to match...) and that the video was stored, archived, etc. by an outside agency that doesn't answer to either party. But I wonder how much of that they'd be able to accomplish.
Instead of turning the camera off, flag that section as private (and only available thru the courts and whatever lesser internal review / complaint mechanism).
There was a case here a few years ago where someone accused the police of assaulting them when they went in to report something (misconduct by a police officer from my vague memory). The police station had cctv cameras, but when the court asked for the video, the 20mins around the time claimed by the victim was "missing due to technical difficulties" - curiously the _only_ missing video in the preceding 18 months or any subsequent time.
If the police get to collect and only use the video when it suits them, I'd like to see "presumption of innocence" not apply (to police) when normally expected bodycam footage is missing.
As someone else mentioned, sometimes bystanders are caught on film doing something they don't want others to know they do -- they're at the "wrong" kind of club, religious service, political event, restaurant, etc. from the perspective of their family or social circle.
And yes, these same concerns apply to other types of cameras -- particularly those that, like police body cameras, might also be used inside private spaces. That doesn't mean we should be "outraged", but we should be concerned about the potential dangers posed by a default expectation of public release.
Finally, I completely agree that police should have to keep their body cameras on during work hours, though there needs to be some solution for restroom breaks.
What if you were being raped in a park and policemen came to assist you.
Would you want that footage to be publicly available?
Likewise, would you want everyone who ever hated you to have access to that footage to use however they want? Once the cat's out of the bag...
Edit: Other fun situations:
1. You're attacked by someone and can't run, but have enough experience/training to subdue them; the cops show up later and the video doesn't show you being attacked, so you look like the aggressor.
2. You're attacked and can't defend yourself or fail to such an extent that people would look at the video and laugh at you.
3. You're on video doing something incredibly out of the norm for you, whatever the reason.
4. You're on video in a PLACE that you wish other people didn't know you frequented. A strip club, a gay bar, a church, a vegan grocery store, a pot dealer, etc.
5. You're on video doing something that your friends/family would react negatively to. Let's say you're a doctor and someone has a heart attack at Political Rally Green. You're up front and on camera for everyone else to see, including your family, who are all diehard Red supporters.
Ubiquitous CCTV would be a lot more unpopular if people looking to build general purpose people-tracking databases, create hit-lists of visitors to abortion clinics, gay bars or synagogues or make thrilling real-life-rape compilation videos found it easy to persuade owners of the footage to share it with them though.
CCTV would also be even more unpopular if it came with sound and instead of recording largely uninteresting ongoings in public spaces, it was used to record intrusions into other people's houses at particularly stressful times and record their stuttering non-answers to very intimate questions and accusations they're often ultimately proved to be entirely innocent of.
My approach? If the cop's camera suspiciously turns out to be "on the fritz, your honor", all the cops evidence loses it's "magic cop assumption of reliability", and they fail to establish any "balance of probability" in a purely he-said/she-said situation. (even _with_ backdated IT support ticket claims - make it in the individual cop's interest to have working, reliable gear - penalise him personally/professionally if he "lets it slide", just like he and his colleagues penalise you if you let your licence or insurance renewal "slide".)
It was a homicide on camera. No one was charged. Hence why bother filming the police? They are already happy to kill people on camera. Filming it changes nothing.
Welcome to the world the public employee unions have created; where once your employed its damn near impossible to fire you, let alone get you charged with a crime.
I agree that public servant unions generally have too much power. However, I'd like to hear more about your theory about how police unions have leverage over judges.
Firing someone is much different from not throwing out a court case against them. I can see how police unions have a lot of leverage over the executive branch, but I'm not sure how they extend that leverage over the judicial branch.
You have to be accused of a crime before a Judge gets involved. That was the whole point I was making. The unions do their best to keep the officer from ever being charged. Got to love the down votes on my previous post, ignorance is of the power of these unions are why we have the problems in the police we do today.
Even politicians run scared as some city unions have put up billboards next to homes of politicians who dare challenge them.
How does the union have any control over who gets charged? They don't other than through the fact that the union reps are also police officers and can exert influence over one another.
It would be far better if a completely independent quasi-citizen/law enforcement organization were required to review use of force by police, and empowered to charge them. Also, having local DA's prosecute cops looks to be a disaster, as well as having the normal grand jury in the loop. Maybe a second grand jury is needed, but made up of poor people instead.
Unions may be far from perfect but your arguments aren't convincing or even particularly relevant. Crying about the downvotes just makes me want to use mine. Maybe the downvotes are because your tone is too trollish.
He was not strangled to death. He died because he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, and he was laid prone on the ground. It is well known that this makes it very difficult for most people (and _especially_ overweight/obese people) to breath. This is explicitly against NYPD protocol, and in my opinion, everyone on that scene (EMS included) should have been charged in his death.
This illustrates exactly why having the gov't do something is a much different thing than when private citizens or groups do something, and why the gov't often ends up with a solution that "doesn't make sense".
I have to wonder if, in the end, what what we'll end up with is universal surveillance, not imposed by police, but imposed on ourselves. It will just be assumed that everyone and every building will be recording video all the time. At that point, it won't matter if police are recording or not.
If the victim/complainant/whatever was the one with the camera, you'd still get most if not more of the benefits of accountability. So how can we make that happen instead? Simple - have the police there in two distinct roles: 1) a cop; and 2) your own personal film crew. They'd film it and perhaps even hold it "in trust", but you'd own it. Such a system would empower citizens a lot and contribute almost nil to the scary mega-state.
We're currently experiencing a shift to authoritarianism by the backdoor with NSA and friends, and in such times cheap and effective solutions such as this, which achieve the stated goal and no more, should be championed I think.
>“If you just put a swirl blur on somebody’s face, it’s not very difficult to unswirl that blur, and then all of a sudden it’s un-redacted,” Shaw said.
Straight from the HN Guidelines: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
A lot of the posts here end up on Reddit and vice versa. Big part of this I suspect is due to the fact that most people here use both sites pretty regularly, I surely do.
Just because an account is less than a year old doesn't mean the person behind the account is new here. I'm certainly not. But thanks for trying to be the internet police. Also, just because a person visits both sites doesn't mean we NEED the circle-jerk BS here.
And if officers can turn them off when ever without accountability then what's the point? We won't have accountability, we'll have accountability theater.
If this cadet (not an officer) hadn't (probably) thrown his career chances out the window, the officer involved would never have been held accountable and probably would continue to do it again in the future: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-cadet-turns-cop-turn...
And, as others mentioned, as long of departments just hand out paid vacations, prosecutors refuse to press charges, and judges let officers go, video cameras won't matter.
I think this made the HN front page the other week, but Seattle PD actually hosted a hackathon with the goal of getting good auto-redaction technology in place so that they could default-release body cam footage: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141222/14345929507/seatt...
58 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadOn the one hand, I would like the footage to be fully released but what about instances similar to people being swatted[0]? Surly there should be limits in place but can we really trust police to be ethical?
Hopefully more people comment but surely there will be more of these types of articles written in the future as body cams continue to roll out.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=swatted
I think most people would agree that the video should come into evidence if someone ends up dead. Also, most people would agree that videos should not all be released publicly. But there are a lot of difficult situations between those two extremes.
Even if the rules about releasing footage are quite restricted, I think body cameras will influence the behavior of police. Not always for the better necessarily, but I think they will reduce the number of fatal police shootings.
Likewise, I'll tell a personal story. I tend to drive fast. I've not had many tickets but I've had a few. Two really cool police gave me warnings a handful of years back instead of tickets; not just a warning but they reminded me of the car seat in the back, my family and suggested I slow down to be safer. It had a dramatic impact, I'd just get pissed off and pay a ticket but the warning, that they chose to give, stuck with me more and I've slowed down. Could that be done by a robot police officer that never takes breaks and follows the law literally and letter by letter? What if those cops had a record of giving certain races warnings but came down hard on other races?
im not against body cameras, especially in the current world of paramilitary style police, but it seems like there is a need for some human wisdom on a case by case basis here. Simple fixes could easily have some bad outcomes.
False accusations go both ways - police are accused of acting improperly and criminals are (obviously) accused of acting improperly.
A good cop should never act improperly but may be accused of it, and they'd want evidence that it isn't the case.
A defendant should be innocent until proven guilty -- and those videos apply just as well. Is the police video for or against you? The court should decide.
If the video is "missing", a outside authority should investigate and weight should be given to the possibility that evidence was tampered with by the police. The public should demand this just as we have body-cameras.
There are certainly some good reasons why such videos shouldn't be (by default).
> Why not have our judicial system decide/review police video on a case-by-case basis, rather than having them be public records?
The judicial system has already shown itself to be inadequate in the matter of self-oversight.
Because body cams will capture footage of victims and associates and bystanders, as well as perpetrators and officers, there's an inherent tension between protecting the privacy of everyone in a video and allowing those in the video to see the captured footage of themselves. Every "simple" solution I can think of (including all of the ones described in the article), I can easily envision scenarios where that proposed solution would seem to be inappropriate.
I suspect the way we handle police body cam videos will be a point of contentious debate for another decade or more.
I think at the very least if the videos are kept secret until judicial review, then the police officers should be forced to keep them on all the time during work hours. The videos should also be automatically uploaded somewhere where that police department can't control what happens to the videos.
SWAT team about to enter a home or use a "no-knock" warrant? They aren't allowed to turn off the camera there. Same for the vast majority of the other police actions that happen in public.
Unfortunately, I'm sure the cops will find some loopholes to abuse this, too, and turn off the cameras when they aren't supposed to, especially if nobody ever punishes cops for such actions (which they don't), but I'd probably still take that over making all footage private by default. In many cases the cops doing bad things would still get caught because they forgot to turn off the camera or didn't think ahead to do it.
Either the cameras are on all the time, or you can forget about them.
And then back that up with career advancement metrics designed to motivate individual cops to ensure their camera gear is working and reliable. Missing 2% of your bodycam footage a week without having made a documented effort to get it repaired/replaced is a warnable offence. Missing more than 5% you get your pay docked. Miss 5% more than twice in a calendar year is a sackable offence. Any claims made in court about events that happen while your bodycam footage is unavailable remove your usual police department protection, and expose you to civil suits that you're normally shielded from. If a civil suit rules that "in the balance of probabilities" you were wrong, you become personally exposed to damages.
As the law & order types love to say "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to fear." It cuts both ways.
There's a wider culture issue with American police organisations, and my understanding is that the situation varies wildly across different states and cities. I don't think that adding complex camera usage rules will help a lot.
I'm not American, and in my country of 5.5 million people the police use the gun about 50 times a year; in this context, pointing gun at someone counts as "using" the gun and needs to be reported. In 2013 the police fired six bullets (training shots are obviously not counted, but warning shots are).
And that six bullets is not per one policeman, they are for the entire police force of 7800 police officers.
And yes, the general public here has almost as many firearms per capita as the Americans do. It's just a different culture. Not one without violence or homicide, but still quite different, from the police point of view.
Have you given any thought to the implications of wearing a camera for 8-12 hours a day? Cops need to use the bathroom too... Body cameras will always need to have the ability to be turned off.
The rest of the time it should be kept and unwatched. Ideally, I also think it would be best if everyone had to give sworn statements before they knew what was or wasn't on video (so nobody gets to change stories to match...) and that the video was stored, archived, etc. by an outside agency that doesn't answer to either party. But I wonder how much of that they'd be able to accomplish.
There was a case here a few years ago where someone accused the police of assaulting them when they went in to report something (misconduct by a police officer from my vague memory). The police station had cctv cameras, but when the court asked for the video, the 20mins around the time claimed by the victim was "missing due to technical difficulties" - curiously the _only_ missing video in the preceding 18 months or any subsequent time.
If the police get to collect and only use the video when it suits them, I'd like to see "presumption of innocence" not apply (to police) when normally expected bodycam footage is missing.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-cadet-turns-cop-turn...
As someone else mentioned, sometimes bystanders are caught on film doing something they don't want others to know they do -- they're at the "wrong" kind of club, religious service, political event, restaurant, etc. from the perspective of their family or social circle.
And yes, these same concerns apply to other types of cameras -- particularly those that, like police body cameras, might also be used inside private spaces. That doesn't mean we should be "outraged", but we should be concerned about the potential dangers posed by a default expectation of public release.
Finally, I completely agree that police should have to keep their body cameras on during work hours, though there needs to be some solution for restroom breaks.
There doesn't seem to be any reason not to make all footage from public areas generally available.
Would you want that footage to be publicly available?
Likewise, would you want everyone who ever hated you to have access to that footage to use however they want? Once the cat's out of the bag...
Edit: Other fun situations:
1. You're attacked by someone and can't run, but have enough experience/training to subdue them; the cops show up later and the video doesn't show you being attacked, so you look like the aggressor.
2. You're attacked and can't defend yourself or fail to such an extent that people would look at the video and laugh at you.
3. You're on video doing something incredibly out of the norm for you, whatever the reason.
4. You're on video in a PLACE that you wish other people didn't know you frequented. A strip club, a gay bar, a church, a vegan grocery store, a pot dealer, etc.
5. You're on video doing something that your friends/family would react negatively to. Let's say you're a doctor and someone has a heart attack at Political Rally Green. You're up front and on camera for everyone else to see, including your family, who are all diehard Red supporters.
As for the rest (people would laugh at you if they saw the video?), that's pretty weak stuff.
Personally, I think the DEFAULT should be "sealed" and then video for times X to Y should be unsealed as necessary for cases.
> As for the rest (people would laugh at you if they saw the video?), that's pretty weak stuff.
I think that depends on who you are. Some people take being the object of popular ridicule better than others.
CCTV would also be even more unpopular if it came with sound and instead of recording largely uninteresting ongoings in public spaces, it was used to record intrusions into other people's houses at particularly stressful times and record their stuttering non-answers to very intimate questions and accusations they're often ultimately proved to be entirely innocent of.
and if the camera "turns out" to be on the fritz, they can provide the IT support ticket, complete with dates and times entries were made.
I mean what does it take to put a cop in prison when a video of him strangling someone to death is not enough?
A great article on how hard it is to fire a cop because of the rules police unions have managed to get into place. http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/19/how-special-rights-for...
Firing someone is much different from not throwing out a court case against them. I can see how police unions have a lot of leverage over the executive branch, but I'm not sure how they extend that leverage over the judicial branch.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-poli...
You have to be accused of a crime before a Judge gets involved. That was the whole point I was making. The unions do their best to keep the officer from ever being charged. Got to love the down votes on my previous post, ignorance is of the power of these unions are why we have the problems in the police we do today.
Even politicians run scared as some city unions have put up billboards next to homes of politicians who dare challenge them.
It would be far better if a completely independent quasi-citizen/law enforcement organization were required to review use of force by police, and empowered to charge them. Also, having local DA's prosecute cops looks to be a disaster, as well as having the normal grand jury in the loop. Maybe a second grand jury is needed, but made up of poor people instead.
Unions may be far from perfect but your arguments aren't convincing or even particularly relevant. Crying about the downvotes just makes me want to use mine. Maybe the downvotes are because your tone is too trollish.
He was not strangled to death. He died because he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, and he was laid prone on the ground. It is well known that this makes it very difficult for most people (and _especially_ overweight/obese people) to breath. This is explicitly against NYPD protocol, and in my opinion, everyone on that scene (EMS included) should have been charged in his death.
I have to wonder if, in the end, what what we'll end up with is universal surveillance, not imposed by police, but imposed on ourselves. It will just be assumed that everyone and every building will be recording video all the time. At that point, it won't matter if police are recording or not.
We're currently experiencing a shift to authoritarianism by the backdoor with NSA and friends, and in such times cheap and effective solutions such as this, which achieve the stated goal and no more, should be championed I think.
Then use a REAL BLUR.
A lot of the posts here end up on Reddit and vice versa. Big part of this I suspect is due to the fact that most people here use both sites pretty regularly, I surely do.
If this cadet (not an officer) hadn't (probably) thrown his career chances out the window, the officer involved would never have been held accountable and probably would continue to do it again in the future: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-cadet-turns-cop-turn...
And, as others mentioned, as long of departments just hand out paid vacations, prosecutors refuse to press charges, and judges let officers go, video cameras won't matter.