Do Police Body Cameras Really Work?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
If I have to choose prior to an encounter "do I want this camera on?" and I choose "no", I have just reminded myself that I can act with impunity. I have just called to my own attention all the things I can get away with because no one will see it. Not only that, but I have also made a small conscious choice to defend myself from scrutiny. Which to me, seems like a small psychological commitment towards doing something bad.
As it is, cops already get the benefit of the doubt almost all the time and when they don't deserve it.
Sadly, I can't see any western country doing it yet. Damn, in my home country there was a case of assault against police officer. A video got public showing the officer walking up to the guy, throwing him on the ground and proceeding to kick him. I believe the judge still took the cop's word.
I can't comment on specific laws concerning police, but can on self-defense. Basically if someone tries to rob you and you break robbers arm you can be hold criminally liable.
This comes as a Soviet legacy, there's some push to change the laws in question.
Body cams are good but they like any other camera fail often at capturing the context, they work and fail at the same time since even the slightest sign of hostility and lack of cooperation can and is used by the police as justification.
The problem is way beyond what cameras can do, if you train your police to be bouncers rather than social workers you'll get violence.
And suddenly, Brin's _The Transparent Society_ comes flooding back to memory.
If it backfires when Police can choose to turn them off that seems to suggest that they act as if having a camera protects them from being questioned. Since they'll likely record video evidence in their favor and just turn it off if they want to use force.
In the case with no camera things would be more balanced (though still skewed toward the police officer's testimony), but selective camera use strongly biases favorably to the police officer.
A camera that's always on should help get closer to the truth for the officer and the suspect.
I'd taken it for granted that a police body camera would not require manual activation. I'd also assumed that they should be always on. Is there really need for better technology here, as opposed to just a change of political will?
On the one hand, 100% on-time is obviously good for police accountability, and knowledge that the camera is always on is probably good for preventing potential violence against officers. Both of these are good things, and so far the evidence does support them.
On the other hand, there are genuine privacy issues for both officers and those they deal with, and there are plenty of non-threatening situations where I see no good reason to require recording. There are obvious situations like officers visiting the bathroom, where neither they nor anyone else using the facilities need anyone to have a permanent record of doing their business. However, there are also a lot of sensitive situations they might encounter while doing their job. I can hardly imagine what it would feel like to get a visit from police officers saying your child just got killed by a drunk driver, but you certainly don't need a camera in your face at the time making a record of your reaction to be kept on file forever. It's easy to imagine a chilling effect on useful information being volunteered discreetly as well.
There will be mistakes. There will be leaks. There will be abuses. The possibility or likelihood of these things happening will surely have a chilling effect, even if serious problems are rare in practice.
Your children comments are neglecting the battery cost (it's a lot cheaper to run a camera waiting to record than recording all the time). Device size is important to customers as is how often they'll need to refresh their hardware and both of these things are affected by required recording time.
>I'd taken it for granted that a police body camera would not require manual activation. I'd also assumed that they should be always on. Is there really need for better technology here, as opposed to just a change of political will? When the government in area mandates the technologies use in an 'always-on' way then this is easy to sell, otherwise you tend to find that the enforcement officers give a lot of resistance to being monitored, it's not because they're doing anything nefarious it's just because people don't like being watched 24/7 and they don't want video evidence of them checking their smart phone (because maybe they shouldn't be) or taking a shit (because who wants someone seeing that?) on the job.
I wonder how much of a middle ground could be reached by turning off-switches into maybe-off-switches or very-very-low-quality switches.
While maybe-off could greatly reduce the "ready for mischief" effect of off switches while keeping much of the battery advantage, I doubt they will bring much relief in terms officer privacy: the great majority of all that toilet/smartphone footage won't ever be reviewed anyway, so reduction by one more stochastical factor won't make much subjective difference.
But low quality is an accepted privacy feature. Think blurred faces etc, it's everywhere. Of course the "nearly off" camera would low-res the whole frame instead of faces and preferably at a not only very low but also jittery frame rate. This could be enough to take the sting out of both battery drain and privacy intrusion, while at the same time yield sufficient information to determine wether the switch has been used in an acceptable deactivation situation or not (e.g out on the street vs at the office). Since this world not only reduce abusive camera deactivation but also make it easier to defend acceptable deactivation, this could even be sold as a plus to both sides.
When they're on duty, though, they are acting in the service of the public, not as private citizens. We need to be very careful about letting them have much or any privacy while they're at work. There's just too much opportunity for abuse.
No, I don't think this is unfair. It's certainly no less unfair than when restaurants like Chipotle and Steak n Shake use open kitchens. Having employees do their work in full view of the customers is not very different from requiring police to use body cameras from a privacy-at-work perspective, and is done for much the same reason.
So if someone has a complaint the video is pulled out and watched, else it goes in a vault and is auto deleted after 60 days.
I'd happily pee while wearing one if that was the case.
It seems to me that a compromise can be reached.
Probably the rules already exist about reporting the headquarters when they are starting a police action, you just have to add the requirement to start the camera.
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I think it's an apple to oranges comparison.
That does not mean the decision to run the camera should be in the officers' hands though. It should be possible to design an algorithm that automatically starts and stops recording based on officer location (like "shut off the camera when the officer is facing a car dashboard").
Then there's also the option to continuously record audio, even when video recording is turned off. There's so many better alternatives than "give the police officer discretion over when to hide their actions".
Unless you work at very odd hours, you probably aren't out on the streets 24/7. You are most likely on the streets for 4-6 hours a day, which really isn't that big of a deal. As for checking smartphones, maybe, just maybe, when police are out protecting people they shouldn't be hanging on social media or playing games on their phones? If you don't want to "get caught" using a smart phone, leave it at your locker. About shitting, maybe there could be a mechanism to turn off the camera for few minutes, so you could do your bathroom stuff in private and there really wouldn't be anyway way to abuse it since you'd see from the context of the video what was going on, e.g. if you are approaching a suspect, then video cuts off for a minute and next thing we see is bloodied suspect then obviously the cop should get penalized for that.
how about their private email and conversations? police work is very boring at times, lots of waiting. Cant leave a scene until detectives or shift relieve you. were supposed to believe that somebody shouldnt have privacy chatting or using smart phone then?
If you can remember to punch in and out for your shift, you can remember to take the camera off and put it back on around bathroom breaks.
There are no very simple solutions to this, no silver bullet.
The guy who doesn't have commit access can't be blamed for breaking the build because if someone accepted his pull request without vetting it properly, now that's on them. See how this works? It's straightforward. More power, more responsibility. Don't like that? Don't become a police officer.
There are plenty of existing professions where people get to second guess what you do; doctors and nurses can be sued for malpractice, engineers who stamp drawings can lose their license and more if a building falls down, pilots can easily lose their life if they mess up badly enough.
I don't see how saying "there are SOME bad cops and there's no way to tell a priori who they are so for the sake of public safety everyone has to wear a camera because these incidents are relatively rare and that's the only way to be sure"
And if there is an incident then probably modesty should not take priority over revelation of the truth surrounding that incident.
But do we trust that? No. Do the police unions trust that? No. Do people who happen to be in a bathroom at the same time with a policeman trust that? No.
Unless you are up to something illegal public cameras shouldn't be an issue in the West where we still have rights to do normal stuff
Always On would mean a task force of moving cameras watching everyone(?)
I think you can easily fit a day's worth of video on an 8GB ssd, so I'd think the problem here is not really technological. Although storing that much video is a pain.
I'm not a video expert but 8GB seems drastically inadequate for meaningful resolution / frame rate. I estimate roughly 291 Kbps which does allow you much resolution / frame rate.
Police body cameras are going to be a lot more like the dash came I recently installed for a trip. 1080p at 30FPS and slightly blurry gets me about 5 hours to a 32 'billion byte' uSDHC card.
That isn't so bad, you can fit a normal shift in to a 64 GByte space, and if you double that up again you'd get almost a whole day's worth of time.
The battery is an issue for sure, but then again Police already come equipped with a belt that has a lot of other stuff, and are usually deployed with a moving vehicle OR are stationed in an area where they will have a regular chance to return to a break room (which is where a natural battery swap would occur).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/01/us/police-body...
If it is claimed (and it is) that police officers sometimes kill people and get away with it, it's easy to conclude that they can also get away with tampering with evidence.
Therefore, I believe it's easy to conclude that body cameras will do nothing at all to curb the instances of police getting away with killing people.
Get ready for "malfunctioning and/or obstructed" cameras.
Most juries will assume you destroyed evidence out of malice, and the prosecution will go for that.
This is sadly already happening.
In places with a long and proud history of police brutality, with a tradition of covering it up at the top levels, the cameras are going to be bought just for show. Soon after officers will realize this and go back to their old ways.
- Footage where a only a small portion of the siltation is visible should be taken with a serious grain of salt. - They only work properly when you have 2 cops: there has to be one "recording" from a distance, at an objective angle. - Bodycams should not have an off function. If it was off or disabled somehow, this should reduce the police its credibility to probably below the defended.
Everyone from Microsoft to various attorneys and activists are drooling over these things, because the one thing that is certain is that they will generate lots of revenue and create lots of litigation.
Personal highlights: footage should not be under the control of the force, and officers should not be permitted to review it before giving statements.
The very notion that you need to be monitored constantly during your shift to ensure you behave as you were trained to is demeaning and insulting.
We trust LEO's to carry loaded guns, mace, tasers, and other weaponry, and we expect them to risk their lives in the line of work, yet we also don't trust them enough to do their jobs honestly and professionally.
If we can't trust our law enforcement personnel to do their jobs without constant video surveillance, sometimes under very difficult circumstances amidst a hostile civilian population for example in the ghetto areas, then we basically can't trust them at all and should find a different model for controlling (or ignoring) criminal behavior.
The ongoing slowdown in police activity in the ghetto areas of Baltimore, Chicago, etc., and the accompanying uptick in violent crime should be a sobering indication of what's in store if we tell our police, "We don't trust you and we blame you if anything goes wrong, now get out there and risk your lives for us."
Put yourself in their shoes and think on this. "I'm honest, I have no reason to oppose video," you may claim from your safe, suburban sofa. But get out on the streets and deal with some of the tough customers they have to deal with, then let's hear how nice and proper you are. These characters only respect strength. If the police are hobbled and limited, they'll just laugh at them.
I prefer the Giuliani model of police administration. Back the police force, give them the authority to stop and frisk, to pick people up for loitering or breaking windows (the "Broken Window" policy), to establish total control on the streets. Then the criminal element will be cowed and subdued, and the police will be confident and enthusiastic, and this whole issue of police feeling they have to overcompensate and work around the laws will go away because they'll be working with the community, working with the government toward the same goals.
The police have created an environment where everyone fears any interaction with the police because if the officer is scared they can and will kill you.
With no consequences for the police.
The police turn on the cameras and expect people to suddenly forget the above. Wont happen.
Paybacks on the police will be taken by certain individuals if they are given a chance.
Frankly all public servants should be required to have a camera running at all times when they are working. If a cop is carrying his weapon he isn't off duty and should have his camera running.
Fine, but be prepared for the first-person video of me taking a piss in some conveniently placed foliage because I'm on a mail route with no bathrooms.