Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yes, I do. You intended to obscure relevant information to purposefully misconstrue or obfuscate the event.
The point of the cameras is that they are additive. That video, even without audio, as an addition to a statement that says something to the effect of "we danced with each other" would be viewed in an entirely different context. If it was in addition to one party stating "we never got close to each other" then it means something else.
In the end, it's additional information. If you have no information about the event whatsoever from the parties involved, just some footage without sound, then you have much larger problems.
I'm feeling so conflicted all of a sudden and it's even April 1
...do you live in the US?
> A civilian...
Police are civilians. Some people see this as hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.
> If I got that close to a traffic cop, I would probably be in jail.
In the US, if you're jailed just for being in close proximity to a police officer, then you've been jailed illegally. (If, however, you refuse to give the guy some room when he asks for it, then you can be detained and (maybe) jailed.)
The misuse of the word is a symptom of the real problem, it is deeply ingrained in police culture that they are fundamentally different. I think it was one of Dave Grossman's books, an author that enjoys a military and LEO following, that put forward the idea that they are sheepdogs - protecting the flock from the wolves. So that is a big problem, as the idea has gotten picked up in popular culture.
I don't really mind cops insisting that they aren't civilians, because I agree with them to a point - the root word doesn't seem to apply anymore. That is unlikely to change without a major overhaul in the standard escalation of force model, where the officer is taught to control a situation by being one level of force above everybody else - making them aggressors by default.
Agreed.
> I don't really mind cops insisting that they aren't civilians...
I do. ;) Because...
> [Police use as a] standard [situation control mechanism the] escalation of force model, where the officer is taught to control a situation by being one level of force above everybody else - making them aggressors by default.
Military police use de-escalation of force by default when interacting with non-combatants. It is drilled and drilled and drilled into their heads that the very fact that they are armed and/or armored automatically escalates the situation, so they MUST continuously work to de-escalate the situation from the microsecond that they arrive on the scene.
Civilian police would be so much more competent and so much more reasonable if they had the same training that actual military personnel receive.
My point is that giving cops the latitude that the escalation of force provides is like giving the CEO's 15 year old nephew the commit bit and letting him write safety critical software in non-MISRA C.
The core of my objection to police personnel calling non-police "civilians" is twofold:
* It lets police benefit from the competency halo projected by the military and their training when -in fact- most police get precious little training.
* It seeks to create a deep division between the police and the communities they serve. Police should be members of (and get to know) the communities that they police.
[0] It's important that cops be able to react with force to uncontrollable, imminently dangerous situations. However, I expect that those situations pretty much never actually happen. ;)
Why is that? I can understand if you think there's a practical problem with doing so (but would still lament that), but I think that ideally "regular cops" should absolutely be held up to that same standard. I mean, look... these people are literally given life-and-death responsibility over the general populace. They should be held to a ridiculously high standard.
It is a practical problem. The military has an extremely long institutional memory and has perfected the process of mental conditioning over hundreds of years, to the point where 18 year olds can be given the power to kill and dropped into situations with little to no supervision - and it generally doesn't result in an x-rated version of Lord of the Flies. The methods that the military uses to accomplish this would not work for police without a costly tear down and slow rebuild. The list of methods is far too long to list here, but they include a culture of self policing enabled by a meaningful shared experience (basic redefinition of family), and a mythology that requires a carefully managed narrative of history (Gen MacArthur's farewell address at West Point is full of examples).
I've heard that before, but never seen any good support for it. I checked several dictionaries, and they say that police are not civilians. Here are the definitions of "civilian" they give.
New Oxford American Dictionary: "a person not in the armed services or the police force".
Merriam-Webster: "one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force".
Cambridge English Dictionary: "a person who is not a member of the police, the armed forces, or a fire department".
Dictionary.com (which uses Random House, I believe): "a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization"
Macmillan: "someone who does not belong to the military or the police".
There are some contexts in which "civilian" means anyone not in the military, but those are generally situations dealing with international laws of war or military law.
I prefer the old definition, because now - due to the corruption of the word, we have no unambiguous word to describe the original concept. We already have plenty of words to describe those without authority.
It probably depends on your state and your police force though. Gendarmes are military trained IIRC, also in Italy there are something like 7 different types of police.
That was what I was pointing out. Unfortunately it was before I had finished the article, otherwise my approach would have been different. Mea culpa.
> In real cases, we often have incomplete or obscuring documentation, and draw conclusions from that. The addition of another perspective can radically change our perception of an encounter.
And that's a really good point, and good on you for making it. The article got stronger as it went on, I juts thought it was pretty shaky in the beginning, because of that first video and how contrived it feels. Granted, I can see it may be problematic to show that situation well while including sound, but that it is possible for it to happen (large crowds, heavy traffic, malfunction, etc). I'm not sure if that calls for a different example, moving it from the first example to a later one, or both, but I think that would make for a stronger start.
As an aside, while it's a bit outside the scope of your article, I think it's very important that all the different perspectives (including participant accounts) be gathered before they've had a chance to see/hear/read others. That one participant describes the experience very differently than others is very important, and can convey a few different things. For example, beyond purposefully misconstruing events, it may just be that the state of mind (terror) of one of the participants kept them from acting rationally. That's information that may be lost if people are allowed to review other sources before giving a statement.
So I don't really understand your comment unless you're just argumentatively agreeing with the author?
When the Orlando, FL police department did a 12-month trial with body cameras:
In the 12 months from March 2014 through February 2015, use-of-force incidents — also known as “response to resistance” incidents — dropped 53 percent among officers with the cameras. Civilian complaints against those officers also saw a 65 percent decline. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-body-camera-study...)
It only serves to cloud the issue, by encouraging people to forget that bodycam video and dashcam video are strictly additive evidence.
A preponderance of the evidence shows that police will do anything they can to suppress information that makes them accountable. Hence dashcam audio that gets disabled, nearby security camera footage that gets deleted, and so on.
Maybe NYTimes is just afraid that they will alienate the police unions if they state the truth: that all law enforcement and the general public alike are protected and constrained by low-cost video recording.
"Chicago Police Department officers stashed microphones in their squad car glove boxes. They pulled out batteries. Microphone antennas got busted or went missing. And sometimes, dashcam systems didn’t have any microphones at all" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160127/archer-heights/what...
The truth is that police generally favor body cameras because it protects their officers from an incredibly high volume of false or overblown claims. Here's one reference: https://www.policeone.com/police-products/body-cameras/artic...
And to pile on the point made by the link that jobu posted, Rialto, CA had similarly stunning results in their study: http://www.ci.calistoga.ca.us/home/showdocument?id=18839 - Big drops in both complaints and use of force. London Metro PD too.
Disclaimer/Pitch: I'm a software engineer at Axon, who produces body worn cameras and digital evidence management software. They facilitated all of these studies, since we can't wait around for other people to do it. We're hiring, if you want to work on a product that does some genuine social good. There's some pretty cool problems to work on with the volume of video data we've got, as well as a whole host of other interesting opportunities. You can email me at brandon@evidence.com if you're interested.
I took this video as being an investigation of that very possibility.
In the first one - the camera was bouncing around a lot, and the main question was whether the guy was punching the guy wearing the camera. I looked at the angle his arms were at in still frames, and concluded that they couldn't be punches. The same works for both angles of the traffic stop video: you have to pause and think through some geometry, but you can figure out that the officer and suspect don't touch with reasonably high confidence.
At the time I'm writing this, both the majority of those who trust and those who distrust the police saw the situations as non-threatening. The difference between the groups is about 9% points, but that is hardly the kind of difference you'd expect from how it is phrased.
That said, the point of body cameras is to help prove or disprove claims by those involved in an incident about what happened. The use of the tazer is not directly visible but even in the shaky body cam you can see the officer grabbing the tazer and hear a distinctive clicking noise as the suspect falls to the ground. It doesn't fully refute the claim that the suspect is reaching for the gun, but as far as the hands are visible, it certainly doesn't support the claim either (and the cop's aggressive behaviour while the suspect is standing still certainly makes the claim more dubious).
It's also important to realize that when these are treated as evidence they won't just be shown once. They will be scrutinized frame by frame, repeatedly, down to the individual pixels if necessary.
There is no perfect evidence. Even crystal-clear, unobscured video footage of a crime doesn't tell the whole story. But court cases are not about proving what happened -- they're about merely eliminating all reasonable doubt about whether a suspect did commit the punishable crime they are charged with.
As with all "facts" in life, court cases only deal with degrees of probability. You don't have to know because you can't actually know.
A point of clarification for the curious—the majority of both groups actually found the situations threatening. The 'serious' threat percentages in the larger numbers, is confined only to the those who chose 'Very threatening' in the questions.
From what you've observed, it sounds like we should revisit that choice (earlier drafts displayed 'Somewhat threatening' and 'Very threatening' choices grouped together, in which case a strong majority of both people who trusted and distrusted the police, found the situations threatening.)
Imagine a Fox news story about an officer shooting someone, with only a few seconds of a video clip released by the police (the rest of the clip is not privy to the public yet). They could replay the same 3-4 seconds over and over and build speculation.
That's not exactly a far-fetched idea, you can probably come up with plenty more. The authors are clearly trying to emphasize that a few seconds of footage is not enough to make a decision - so you agree with them.
These details were not captured by the police body camera, though, revealing another important point: Body cameras prioritize the officer’s point of view.
The tazer, including the officer aiming, was clearly visible and it causing the fall was very obvious from the body camera.
Same with the other videos. You don't even need software to analyze frame by frame, the web player is enough to see what is going on.
Cameras protect the innocent because they do not lie.
The point of the article seemed to me to be about whether you can reconstruct the true narrative of a situation from fragmented and incomplete data. So It seemed valid to me to use any scenario to test that ability, dancing included.
1. Police purposely buy and insist on camera models that have very limited vision, range and abilities because they want it to be as bad or worse than a cop's limited observation ability
2. Police have learned a new trick - they do not legally have to release the camera footage at all - it is essentially for their own purposes only - so if it helps them, they release it - if it works against them, they don't release it and nothing you can do about it
If we want to change this, the same lawmakers that give police millions of tax dollars for cameras needs to set higher standards, better cameras and full release of videos to all involved parties in a very timely manner or face criminal penalties of their own.
I found the car stop the most threatening for the officer. Seriously, if you're stopped by the cops, hands on top of the steering wheel... reaching for insurance papers looks hella scary.
I would have expected the officer to pause for longer before approaching the door and to be a lot more vocal about what he is doing -- precisely because he can't tell what is going on from a quick glance. You don't want to get stabbed but you also don't want to taze or shoot an innocent person to death.
The original footage was not confusing, in my opinion. It was fabricated to look like a violent interaction faced by an officer, and that is the most likely situation. The audio off is necessary for the fabrication.
A camera mounted on the officer's glasses/hat would only make it even clearer as there'd be less jerk. Perhaps a larger viewing angle would be useful too.
Most of the videos linked to are a bit artificial, in my experience video taken while an officer runs isn't normally all that interesting.
The biggest bonuses we found were: Just telling someone it was being recorded often made things less aggressive. Drunks & disorderly offenders would plead guilty once they'd been shown the video from the previous night which means an officer doesn't have to go to court. Less complaints and often there is a way to sort out the truth. Domestic violence was a lot easier to prosecute, my favourite tale was a drug den with a small child where within 24 hours the parents had somehow managed to repaint / get fresh furniture when the social workers went back the following day.
Most of the UK officers I've met have been good folks trying to do a difficult job, although the US officers I spoke to do did seem to be a bit more military in their attitude.
That said, most people (and police) are mostly good.
Some people, and some classes of people[1] are almost guaranteed to have bad encounters with cops.
A good goal would be to reduce the number and severity of bad encounters.
1. Ethnic Minorities, Persons with mental health issues, etc.
I live in the UK where we have a completely different approach to policing.
I trust the police. They work hard in our communities to gain that trust. They don't always get it right and they have their issues (some very big) but on balance they are a trusted part of (most of) our communities here.
I really don't want to get into a flame war or anything, it's just that lots of different place in the world have very different police forces.
In the future where everything is recorded the records should be sealed unless a warrant for those recordings is presented. The warrants should be made public.
Recording everything is alredy happening in some cities, like London, but the control is on the side of law enforcement.