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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Though I agree that this behavior is reprehensible and probably criminal, the comments here seem to miss at least some of the human dynamic here.

I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure. Saying that this is what cops signed up for is not a compelling counter argument either, as this is new and most of the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.

It seems odd to be even somewhat defending Chicago cops but someone should point out that there are two sides to this.

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I also don't work at a job where I am legally empowered by the state to kill people. Extraordinary power requires extraordinary checks and balances. Our country has erred in giving these people extraordinary power with virtually zero checks and balances, and the result has been a steady stream of murders committed by these state agents against marginalized populations. These monitoring devices, and laws that should be implemented making it criminal to damage or disable them, are a tiny, tiny move in the right direction of limiting the insane excesses of police power.

Also, I don't really give a shit what the murderers in the CPD and their blue wall of silence accomplices want or signed up for at this point.

>I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure.

Well, if by "entire working life" you mean "every time they go in patrol or are on a call" then yes. Nobody is interested in their water cooler talks.

>Saying that this is what cops signed up for is not a compelling counter argument either, as this is new and most of the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.

Then maybe they should not let the door hit them on their way out?

>Well, if by "entire working life" you mean "every time they go in patrol or are on a call" then yes. Nobody is interested in their water cooler talks.

I may be off base here, but cops seem to be on patrol for almost their entire shift.

Patrolling Dunkin' Donuts, sure

Well, let's put it this way, we don't need to record what they say inside their police car while waiting the day to pass by.

But any chasing on the street, interaction with a suspect, raid, etc, should be recorded.

We trust cops to protect the weak, to wield and use firearms, and to enforce our laws. This puts them in a tremendous position to abuse their power.

The recording devices were installed precisely because abuses of power and criminal activity were already a big problem. The thugs destroyed the recording devices because they want to continue abusing their power, period.

For an honest cop, the recordings offer proof of proper conduct. In the setting of lethal force, the truth is very important. If I follow protocol and shoot someone, I hope there is a video showing that I followed the playbook perfectly.

I've been bullied by cops a few times. Their job is tough, but it strikes me as odd that they bully someone like me, an obviously harmless, non-criminal.

Your comment brings up the old and terrible response "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide"

Is that irony? I never can tell if I use that word right.

The difference between citizen and cop surveillance is that a citizen should be protected from bullying, blackmail, etc. by the government or other citizens over private actions. A cop should do his or her job exactly as prescribed.

As the other person who replied points out, it's very different for a trusted government official and a private citizen. The official gives up his/her right to privacy when acting in the role of public enforcer of laws...

You're both quite right and so I can only imagine that isn't impressed enough on newly minted government officials.

Cops are trained to establish control of a situation by being unfriendly, authoritative, and uncompromising. It could come across as bullying if you don't know what's going on.

Maybe we should be training them to be friendly, authoritative and reasonable instead. You don't need to be an asshole to exert control; in fact it's much easier to do so if you aren't.

I don't think you know anything about controlling a situation when you're in the presence of thugs and criminals. All of these people who have no idea of what it's like to be a police officer sitting here being critics and armchair psychologists is just really tiring.

Fair point. What I do know is that I'm a lot less scary to harass than actual thugs and criminals. They should do their job and fight crime, not flex their muscles around non-criminals.

> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded.

The working life for most hackers is rather privileged, so perhaps most people reading this would not care for such working conditions.

However, more and more "blue-collar" jobs are conducted under similar conditions. 100% surveillance on video. Audio recording. Recording all the calls you take or make in a call centre. Recording when you take bathroom breaks and when you are at your station.

Nanny-cams for cleaners, health-care providers and (well of course) child care providers in private homes. It goes on and on, but if you step outside of our cozy little tech community, you find that people are treated just like any other cog in a machine, which means they are instrumented and monitored at all times.

If I log into client infrastructure at my job (large corp), my activities are monitored. Audits are always kept of mission-critical data, and access to it closely watched. I wouldn't be surprised if my work machine contained software to monitor various aspects of my work. Frankly, I wouldn't want it any other way - as developers, we can do a lot of very expensive damage, and those logs are a way of proving you conducted yourself like a professional at all times.

Maybe this isn't common in SV, but if you work for a large organization who needs to be able to answer a client when they ask 'what happened at x on y', you better believe things are in place to make it happen.

I don't believe it's unreasonable to expect the same from police.

Being a police officer isn't exactly like other jobs. You are granted powers (killing, detainment, seizure, trespass) which are forbidden to any other citizen. You want to be special, you can deal with a nannycam.

Most cops don't sign up to do what they end up doing. Having been on a few ride-alongs, and knowing a few cops personally, my impression is that the job is much more paperwork than it is actively saving the community from the bad guys. I'm not belittling the importance of paperwork, mind you, it's just that cop work, just like every other kind of work, is not like TV.

These reforms don't happen overnight. The city council, the police chief, the mayor, the police union, the prosecutor's office, the governor -- they've debated and discussed dashcams for a long period of time, because it's not just about policy, but also effectively implementing it, with all the speed that most government contractor work happens at. These reforms didn't happen at a speed at which even the old cops were blindsided at. They had plenty of time to consider a new career without resorting to criminal obstruction of justice out of petulance.

Recordings aren't on all the time. Think about the rest of the picture. These guys do highly questionable (shooting people under dubious circumstances) and get paid leave. They sure as heck don't have their entire patrol recorded. If the union can negotiate the former the latter is a cakewalk.

They're typically set up so when lights or sirens come on then the audio/video recording gets turned on and stays on for an amount of time after lights/sirens turn off which is usually a minute or more. This is to discourage behavior like using lights/sirens to run red lights or bypass traffic jams. Years ago cops used to warn people who were going too fast but not fast enough to be worth a ticket by flashing their lights. They don't do this anymore because the chief doesn't like to see them giving out warnings based om something like "If you can stop the guy then stop him, who knows, you might get lucky and he's got a bong in the passenger seat, you don't catch any fish without a line in the water"

I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded

I started out doing phone tech support. I doubt I am the only one.

Phone tech support: every word recorded, probably video in a lot of cases. Retail: video of the whole store is common, unsure about audio. Office work: every worker signs a document saying everything they do on the network can/will be recorded and reviewed, which for many may be the bulk of their communication during work hours. The list goes on -- and none of these people are legally empowered to kill anyone.

The dash cams are for their benefit. There was a county in another state that implemented dash cams for their police force and found an 80% drop in complaints against officers.

Why do officers feel like they are being watched? The dash cams are to protect them. If they fear being watched, perhaps they know they aren't doing their job?

>The dash cams are for their benefit. There was a county in another state that implemented dash cams for their police force and found an 80% drop in complaints against officers.

Baloney. The cameras are for the public's benefit.

Imagine your employer (or whatever) came to you and said, "From now on, you're wearing a camera whenever you're working. It's for your benefit; if anyone ever accuses you of slacking off, you'll have the video evidence to prove that you're not."

Would your productivity increase? Almost definitely. Is the camera really for your benefit? Nope.

It's true though, in this case.

Police are far more likely to have complaints levied against them than most other professions. There's minimal downside as a pissed-off arrestee to filing a spurious complaint.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/2014/03/28/fact-check-do-poli...

> Police officers in the small city of Rialto in San Bernardino County have been wearing cameras since 2012. Rialto Police Chief William A. Farrar, working with a Cambridge University researcher, found two big results: Complaints against his officers declined by 88 percent and officer use of force declined by 60 percent.

A police department with body cameras probably won't see many false "he called me a nasty word!" complaints, and cops will be a lot less likely to actually use a nasty word or unnecessary force. Good cops benefit from being able to defend themselves, and bad cops either shape up or get caught.

That is, of course, as long as the department cares when they break their cameras.

"Slacking off" is very different from "Shot and killed someone". Recording people at work is proportionate to reducing killings.

My manager looks through all of the code I commit as part of a review process. How is that any different? I know that if I commit sloppy code, he will come and talk to me. And if I commit good code, he will give me a hearty handshake and a pat on the back. So I try not to commit sloppy code because I know he is watching.

If you've worked a retail job, or one handling stock or money, you've been surveilled as much as humanly possible while you were working.

I've worked at places where phone calls were retained.

Absolute privacy is at ends with most business requirements. And they usually handle goods.

Police handle livelihoods and lives.

"I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure."

It's becoming more common - professional atheletes and politicans fit into this category, even many day care workers who are paid even less than cops. I'm sure others can think of additional professions.

Well, for most devs/IT workers their whole internet activities are recorded too.

> I can't hardly imagine that most people posting here would ever consider a job where literally every word or sound that came out of their mouth during their entire working life was recorded, and likely subject to public disclosure.

Taxi cab driver? Truck driver? Pilot? Train engineer? And none of them even get guns.

Though the train engineer and pilot have the ability to kill a lot more people if they mess up on the job.

I'm not certain cops signed up for indoctrination into a culture where it is acceptable to routinely prevaricate in official reports and testimony for the purposes of self-preservation, or even just personal convenience.

If the things you do and say could have drastic, life-changing repercussions for other people, you should have someone monitoring them. If you don't want to be watched all the time, the only acceptable alternative is to be unimpeachably trustworthy. On the strength of just a handful of reports where the objectively verifiable facts--such as bystander smartphone video footage--contradict the official police story, that option is sadly no longer available.

If your child made a habit of lying to you on a regular basis, would you or would you not supervise their behavior more closely? If the CPD were your child, it would have emptied your bottle of vodka, crashed your car into your spouse's car, killed the family dog in the process, and when questioned about what happened, it would have said, "Bad dog. You probably should have trained him not to drink and drive.... -hic-"

> the cops in question didn't sign up to work in an environment like that at all.

But you're wrong -- cops have always had to face public scrutiny of their actions. The words they speak and the asses they beat have always been capable of being used as evidence in court.

Too bad, so sad. It's either give them cameras or take away their guns, and we know what is not going to happen in America.

There are many folks who would love to become commercial pilots.

...on the other hand, the cockpit voice recorders a) only record a loop of a few hours, so after an intercontinental flight they will have overwritten everything on the first half of the flight and b) there's a button to erase them.

https://www.google.de/search?q=a320+cockpit+voice+recorder+p...

Apparently the button erases tape when pushed for two seconds, provided the airplane is on the ground and the parking brake handle is on.

http://www.a320homecockpit.de/downloads/a320flightdeckdocume...

This is interesting.

A lot of IT workers have an expectation of privacy when working on a company owned computer. I wonder what they would say to being monitored. Probably be appalled.

If we factor out the "lives are on the line" aspect of it and only look at the "making sure one is doing their job properly" aspect, then what's the difference?

This is a great point. And there is a very easy compromise here. Make the tapes legally sealed from the public unless a judge issues an order to unseal it.

If you're not intelligent enough to know that law enforcement interactions with the public are recorded on dashcams, maybe you shouldn't go into police work...

But that's part of my point. When most cops became cops that wasn't the case at all.

When did most cops become cops? Shortly after discharging from the military. Amped up on PTSD and adrenaline addiction. Yeah, I want a camera on them every second of the day, whether they are on duty or off duty. The mentally ill should not have guns. We've had a steady drum beat that "common sense gun control" should include a psychological test. I don't think most cops coming into the job straight out of the military would be able to pass the same test proposed for civilians.

The majority of police forces have psychological testing for applicants and routinely dismiss otherwise fit, healthy and intelligent individuals because the psych came back inconclusive.

Most big city cops are not ex-military. In smaller and rural departments it's more common, but the demographic for Chicago area cops is almost certainly working class families from the greater Chicago area, and most probably already started thinking about starting the process soon after graduating high school.

We're talking about dash cams here, not body cams. They had TV shows in the 90s based on police chase videos from dash cams. World's Wildest Police Videos first aired in 97, though I suspect there were shows prior to that, the names I cannot recall. So police dash cams have been in the popular culture for almost 20 years. I think cops in Chicago (or any city) knew what they were signing up for at this point.

Most police officers are not just older workers forced to adapt. According to the NYPD, the median age of their academy graduates is 26.

Younger beat officers are overwhelmingly utilized for patrol duties. They knew or should have known dashcams could be in use during during those patrols.

Sucks to be them. How is that different to any other profession where things changed with new technology or market trends?

Most people working in most offices in 1980 didn't have to use PCs either. In 1990 most of them suddenly did.

Tough shit. They either abused their power or stood by while their colleagues abused their powers.

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