Not One New York Police Officer Has a Body Camera | Hacker News Reader

Not One New York Police Officer Has a Body Camera

nytimes.com

69 pointskyleblarson35 comments

I was so excited when police body cameras became a thing. I figured that some kind of beureucratic oversight would stop most, if not all funny business-- BOY WAS I WRONG!! They 'accidentally' turn them off, don't bother wearing them or don't give the public access to the footage.

These cameras are completely worthless until they start working for the public and not abused by corrupt police depts. All cops need to have these and they need to be uploaded to a third, impartial party at the end of the day, every day, or abuse will be commonplace. I guess I did read somewhere that police complaints dropped 97 (??) percent since the use of body cameras, but where? Certainly not nation wide.

The police departments have nothing to gain and everything to lose from this, so these shenanigans make some twisted sense to me. One could argue that they stand to gain [back] the trust of the public, but I honestly doubt that they even really care about that, since at the end of the day their paycheck is written by the government and not the population, and they're the ones with the guns and the license to kill.

> The police departments have nothing to gain and everything to lose from this,

Police are somewhat protected from malicious complaints by body-worn camera, so they do have something to gain from it.

Burying a malicious complaint is trivial. Question the officer involved, take their word over the complainer's.

Uh, no.

It's a civil suit, not a criminal one (or, more accurately, potentially in addition to a criminal one). The department cannot bury a civil suit, nor trivially get it dismissed. And the burden of proof in a civil suit is substantially less than in a criminal one -- a "preponderance of evidence" vs "beyond a reasonable doubt".

The massive fines come from the civil suits, usually, not criminal ones. And that doesn't even count the ones settled out of court because paying them is cheaper than he legal fees alone for going to court.

So, yes, significantly reducing such suits is very much in the interests of both the police departments and (more importantly) the legislative bodies that fund them.

> The police departments have nothing to gain and everything to lose from this

How about respect?

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Of course, the Seattle P.D.'s implementation of body cameras merely revealed that not only were they incompetent at policing, they were also incompetent at basic IT capabilities. So I guess that's a risk for New York.

Sure they have something to gain - proof against frivolous lawsuits, for which they are often the target of.

Of which the city [residents] pays to defend against and pays for any damages.

Yes, and this is a good thing for everyone involved.

Police unions.

Some of the numbers you're thinking of come from:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/03/police-complaints-drop-93-...

Which also makes the point that the behavior sticks even when the cameras are gone.

There was also another article a few weeks ago that made the point that the majority of police officers actually wanted the cameras back after the experiment ended.

Los Angeles is going large on the concept of body cameras:

[... The LAPD already has about 860 cameras, purchased through private donations. Last year, the LAPD negotiated a contract with Taser International to provide thousands more as well as replacement equipment, digital storage of the recordings and thousands of Tasers. ...]

http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-lapd-body-cameras-2...

Perhaps there is a SAAS opportunity in there somewhere?

That's part of Taser International's business. They basically are providing a lifecycle solution from replacement to cloud storage for their body camera product.

Edit: Although I have no idea if they are doing it "well" and there may be pain points to fix in the day to day. So yeah, probably an opportunity there.

I imagine that the classification or definition of 'well' is somewhat specific to the role in this discussion.

Keep in mind the speed at which government moves. There may be an opportunity, and it may be a large one, but I doubt it's an agile one (at least, to start with).

Although targeting smaller departments may yield much faster results!

Key quote:

“What do you expect to happen when the N.Y.P.D. sets the terms and the pace of police reform?” Councilman Torres said in an interview.

Well some cities that have had them are actually losing them because retention rules keep changing and beyond thirty days it becomes very expensive to manage all that video. Think of just the storage requirements then go beyond that to determine providing usable queries of the video along with proper protection of the video until expiration

Once we get all this NSA dragnet nonsense stopped, we will have two shiny new zettabyte-capacity data centers that we can use to store all the video. Simple!

Does anyone know more about the current common retention rules?

Seems to me an easy way to cut down on the amount stored is to detect for interactions (say, other voices in the recording, definitely gun shots, etc), and then save an amount before, after and during. Maybe twice the response time for a call, for the before? The after may be harder. You can then pair it down from there. Or, could dispatch control it? Start recording when dispatched / called, stop recording when the situation is resolved, according to dispatch.

>department’s approximately 35,800 officers

>a company had been chosen to supply up to 5,000 over the next five years.

>The Police Department says it is committed to outfitting officers with body cameras

So the plan is to equip a whopping 1/7th of officers in the next five years? I must be thinking of a different definition of "commitment" than the one the NYPD seems to use.

I will say that not all of those 35,800 are patrol officers, though I share your sentiment about the NYPD's level of commitment.

And not all patrol officers are on duty at the same time.

I wonder how much current equipment is checked out daily and shared?

In the recent Charlotte police shooting incident, it was disappointing to see how unhelpful the body-camera video was. I'm not sure whether that was an anomaly, or whether it's just very difficult to get useful footage from a body camera.

Maybe they need additional 360 cameras deployed on an extendable periscope above a cruiser.

Why not focus on something that can be fixed without need for extra budget, like, say, ending stop and frisk?

You don't need a police body camera to observe that abuse of power.

Why not both?

Because we have massive police abuse right there in the open, and nothing is done about it. And not for lack of evidence!

If the city won't deal with this problem, what makes anyone think that of all things, cameras will remove any roadblocks?

Without serious interest in tackling police abuse, cameras are a feel-good placebo.

Eric Garner was killed on video. Exactly what has been done about that? Nothing and nothing?

Last night, the candidates for Vice President had a minutes-long discussion about community policing and implicit bias. To say that nothing individual incidents had no effect is to miss the forest for the trees.

Eric Garner's death certainly had an impact across the country - but one place where it didn't was the NYPD.

This is precisely why we can't have both. I have the feeling that body cameras are used as a smoke-and-mirror diversion, by organizations that aren't committed to change.

That's called pandering. Other than that, nothing has changed.

> Eric Garner was killed on video. Exactly what has been done about that? Nothing and nothing?

Not quite true - there was one person who was charged (and convicted). Two days ago, the person who filmed Garner's death was just sentenced to 4 years in prison, for charges which many believe were in retaliation for filming the video[0][1][2].

> Stanley Cohen, a New-York based lawyer and former social worker who in the 1980s held community cohesion sessions with the city's police departments, said that Orta's case was an example of "vicious, retaliatory and vindictive" intimidation. "They want to create an environment where people are terrified to speak up and out and be good citizens," [he said].

More broadly, citizen bystanders are routinely harassed for filming police encounters on their cell phones and told that this is illegal (it's not). I happen to live near a highly-trafficked (and therefore highly policed) area, so I see this happen with my own eyes all the time.

Preserving citizens' rights to film public encounters with police is far more important than providing officers with the means to film the encounters themselves.

[0] http://www.vibe.com/2016/10/ramsey-orta-eric-garner-four-yea... [1] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ramsey-orta-filmed-eric-... [2] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/10/ny-man-fil...

The political power of the NYPD keeps them from having to use cameras and is exactly the problem. Lack of cameras is just a symptom of a problem that has to be fixed first.

There are other things they fix as well, such as complaints against officers: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/09/29/study-finds-body...

That study is... Contentious, even among technophiles, as per the previous HN discussion thread on it.

The most important thing that body cameras 'fix', is giving the public the perception that the police are doing 'something' to solve the problem. (Now that we've done something, can everyone be quiet, and go back to work?)

This is why police departments tolerate the idea of body cameras. It gives them more budget, and the impression of accountability - all the while, without having to do anything to change cop culture. Cops know that no amount of video evidence will overpower the testimony of a reliable, professional eyewitness - themselves.

Yes, simply ending stop and frisk doesn't add to the budget. Unfortunately, these sorts of answers don't really solve the problems. And most of what I think is needed all costs money. It isn't like these are sudden problems: I heard stories of this sort of thing 20 years ago. Folks have been observing this stuff for years, and nothing has happened. Unfortunately, this stuff tends to happen more to folks that are poor and/or minorities.

Training, for example. Teaching de-escalation techniques, anger management, ways to overcome bias, speaking to folks and a bit of persuasion, and things like that. Training costs money. Paying cops to do community building service instead of the stop and frisks still costs money. Regulations and legislation costs money (and luck!) to pass and to implement. Transparency: Yup. Costs money.

Body cameras can be misinterpreted, but right now, it is a step in the right direction. Even if the studies are weird and inconclusive, it makes folks feel like something correct is being done, so long as it is on a wide scale and very few incidences of the cameras mysteriously malfunctioning - and probably other things I haven't considered.

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