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Comment by phusion | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Police unions.

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.

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.

> 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.

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