Hacker News Reader

Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

A lot of progressives were pro-body-cam in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests but from my view, unless they are accompanied by very strict protocol rules (probably at the state or federal level) they simply increase officer optionality.

If the officer can decide what to record, what to to submit in a report, if the lens is dirty or covered, etc... it really is very tempting.

They certainly have helped cops put away very bad people and they certainly have put pressure on cops to follow official protocol but they're not a panacea if not regulated tightly. For example look at the protocol proposals of Campaign Zero here: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/film-the-police

View on HN

IIRC the Campaign Zero people were talking about this right at the start. Letting possible perps view the footage to get their story straight is particularly egregious.

Does "possible perps" include police officers?

Always. I see no reason that suspects of crimes should be treated differently on the basis of their occupation.

Good! It's not a given. Lots of people seem to trust police implicitly.

I don't know what various regulatory environments exist for body cameras, but in an ideal world body-camera footage would be operated and held by some neutral external part and only made available as evidence in court. For example, in the UK we have the Independent Police Complaints Commission which is, in theory, independent from the police force.

From what I can tell this isn't the case in the UK, and police forces operate the infrastructure themselves.

> When a police officer returns to a station, the cameras are placed in a docking station, where the footage is automatically uploaded to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

> Officers also decide how to categorise the footage, and whether it will be useful as further evidence. If the officer concludes it is not useful, the footage will be automatically deleted after 31 days – but if it is considered useful as evidence, it can be stored indefinitely, Hutchinson said.

> In practice, the cameras are not always rolling, and it is up to the individual officer when to turn them on or off.

http://www.techworld.com/security/met-police-picks-microsoft...

That seems like a recipe for unaccountability and a real missed opportunity, especially for the Metropolitan Police who have a bit of a track record for abusing technology... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/may/18/police-dna-...

Allowing the cops to fully control the infrastructure of a technology that may be used as evidence against them is, in my opinion, a big mistake. This includes the ability to turn the cameras off, whether that is by pushing a button or by opening up the case and snipping a wire with diagonal cutters.

Always on. Always under independent control. The actions of public servants are public record, and the public desires that its servants not be corrupt. That footage should be going to the prosecutor's office, the public defender's office, and the state's records office before anyone else is allowed to touch it.

That little on/off button might still be useful, to mark portions of the video that the police department might like to retrieve from the records office and review after an incident, but the idea that a cop will always act honorably when no one is watching seems to have been a myth ever since ol' Bobby Peel invented the modern cop.

The concept sounds positive, though I wonder if/how it would work in real life.

For example, when an officer needs to go to the toilet. Er... if they can't turn off the camera that heads right into weird territory.

Imagine you're in a public toilet area (eg using a urinal), and a cop walks in needing to go as well. Thus your junk is now being filmed.

[etc] ;)

If there's a proper procedure for data management, no-one will ever see that footage unless it is of interest to a legal case. In which case, it is self-evidently worth having.

And using a public toilet doesn't give you immunity from being arrested.

I imagine many vulnerable people would be A-OK with having their junk filmed if it saves them from a police beating.

I imagined it. In my imagination, the urinals had partitions, and the cop followed the etiquette by leaving a buffer urinal between us. My crotch was therefore never visible to the camera.

I also imagined that the cop didn't wash his hands afterward, and I didn't know what to do about it, or even if I could do anything about it. Employees have to wash their hands at restaurants, right? Cops touch all kinds of stuff with their hands. If I file a complaint, would they even do anything about it? And then if I ever encounter that cop and act sort of weird because I'm thinking about whether he's going to touch me and get his junk-cteria and splashback on me, will he take it as reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, and make it self-fulfilling?

The eye in the center of a cop's chest is just like the eyes in their head, and the eyes in the head of a non-cop. If my junk is filmed, it is because I was acting in such a way that any random passer-by could have seen it. My expectation of privacy is that only people of the same sex will even have the chance, but that's about it. I don't drop my pants without at least a privacy lock. Anyone could walk in to a public toilet, from a cop with an active body cam, to the entire sousaphone section of a marching band (based on a true story).

It is more concerning for instances where a cop is executing a warrant in a place where there is a genuine expectation of privacy, such as a suspect's own bedroom. Those videos would have to be kept under lock and key until some trustworthy individual can determine that the public has an interest in seeing them that outweighs the individual's right to privacy.

It's a mystery to me why police should be regarded as unimpeachable paragons of rectitude. It's like people haven't been paying attention to the news for the last five years.

As far as I know, the investigating officer would take a statement from a suspect at the time of arrest. So there's no opportunity for a suspect to "get their story straight."

In fact, these cameras offer the opportunity to verify the statements of officers, witness and suspect against whatever is captured by the cameras, which is a net positive.

A potential problem is that the officers would get an opportunity to verify and practice their story based on the camera footage, while the suspects would not.

A prosecutor could establish that the suspect's memory of the situation is not completely correct. Meanwhile, the police officer would have a fantastic, (almost photographic!) memory of the scene. The prosecutor could then ask each about something that wasn't captured on camera. The police officer claims he saw the suspect commit the crime, the suspect claims he did not...who is a jury going to believe after that?

Don't give a statement to the police.....

In court you be be able to see the tape

I think OP is talking about officers as "possible perps" and referencing the fact that officers can view the footage before filing a police report recounting their own version of events.

IIRC the Campaign Zero people were talking about this right at the start.

Yes they have AFAIK too..

I'm not sure that people (including these orgs) realize that body cams without the oversight may be worse than having no body cams. To pick one example they highlight NJ law A2500 (http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2014/Bills/A2500/2280_I1.HTM) to highlight as a win for their policies but looking at the law's text it basically seems to say police cars used primarily for traffic violations will be equipped with cameras and DUI fees will be increased to help fund them. I have no idea if there is any existing regulation on the officer's use of those cameras.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com