A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

Then it comes down to jamming, tampering, malfunction, sabotage, and any misbehavior that otherwise prevents useful recordings, since we’re talking about wearables that can be covered, discarded and left behind, even if thy can’t be turned off. But if it does get recorded, it needs to get locked up tighter than handcuffs.

That video needs to dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Depends really. Moving to a different country would be my next step personally.

Nonsense. Cameras will be always used to benefit only the police as long as they control them: it's easy to cherry-pick what to record and, later on, what to release. It's easy to take off a camera altogether.

You need 3rd parties (e.g. bystanders) to be able to record what's happening and stream it it safe storage in real time.

Yeah, no. It's not that dangerous.

I hear this every time someone with a difficult job has it pointed out to them that they're doing it badly. They don't even pretend that somehow makes it acceptable to do the job badly; I honestly don't know what effect saying it is supposed to have.

I don't know how to be an orthopedic surgeon. The closest thing I've had to medical training was a first aid and CPR class. What I do know is that if an orthopedic surgeon, upon first seeing an overweight patient complaining of hip pain says "lay off the cheeseburgers and your hip will be fine, you fat slob", that doctor is doing a bad job. Not only is it hostile and rude, it fails to attempt to adequately understand the situation before rushing to judgement.

I do know a little about how to be a police officer. I went to school for it, but decided that wasn't what I want to do with my life. Accusing a complainant of lying right off the bat without any investigation when the complaint is anything more believable than an alien abduction, then having the evidence of your rudeness deleted is not how to be a good cop. I don't think it really takes much training or experience to reach that conclusion.

The next morning I get a call from the detective in the county to the South confirming he obtained video from the gas station where this all originated (the defendant approaching me while I’m pumping gas).

Next I get a notification from Apple my iPad has been found, which I placed in lost/stolen mode. I call the detective who doesn’t answer his phone and then the police station in the county where I escaped and my iPad was located. Dispatch informed me they would not go to the address provided by Apple to look for the defendant, my car or iPad until I drove back up to that county and met with the police.

I drove back to the county and met with two police officers who drove to the address (only 1.5 miles from the police station) but they did not see my vehicle, and apparently there was no way they would get a warrant to search the domicile for my iPad and they wouldn’t bother knocking to see if the suspect was there.

Unconvinced I worked up the nerve to drive by the property myself...I’ll be damned if I didn’t see my car driving up and down the streets of this neighborhood. I did my best to tail the car until it parked 1 house away from the address provided by Apple, and watched as the defendant got out of my car walked into the the street as I drove past. Once again I called 911 and plead they come back out to the address while I waited a few blocks away.

Once I saw a police car enter the neighborhood I followed until we arrived at my car which had already been relocated about a block away from where I saw it park and I drove past the defendant. On scene an officer was questioning 2 individuals on the front porch of the house where my car was parked and the defendant was standing on the sidewalk about 5 feet from my car. I basically yelled officer that’s the man who kidnapped me with a gun and car jacked me. He was handcuffed and taken into custody.

Shortly after I was asked to appear at the police station where I ended up being questioned and accused of trying to buy “the hard stuff”...I had to ask, apparently that’s crack. And this was the same detective who already obtained video of the gas station corroborating my entire story, I explained I was an attorney that I had just run 18 miles on the morning I was kidnapped (showed my run keeper app and everything) and otherwise I wasn’t celebrating my 18 mile run with crack. Almost immediately I was told I can go, of course I asked if he would get a warrant to recover my iPad and more important look for the gun, and I was told “no, those kinds of resources don’t exist.”

The defendant was arrested on Sunday, charged with grand theft of an auto and bonded out on Monday. Not until the “State Attorney Hearing” a few weeks later where the State attoney confirmed she had 2 prior cases against this guy where with similar facts: he stole a car in the county to the South and the cars were recovered in the county to the North, did I finally feel vindicated. Then, 1 week later his bond was revoked and the real charges came including assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping with a fire arm.

As to it being easy to be a armchair quarterback, I wouldn’t know but I’ll take your word for it.

Edit: deleted link to the public record of the case

Technically though, officer of the court is a pretty broad term that includes judges, magistrates, medical examiners and coroners, process servers, interpreters, and even bail bondsman. Anyone who plays a role in the functioning of the court and has duties to ensure justice is carried out. But really in practice you never hear anyone except lawyers refer to themselves as such.

It's usually a phrase we use to indicate that messing with us means messing with the judicial system, which tends to invite harsh punishment from judges, who are after all themselves attorneys.

One reason is that the police department thought it mattered.

I’ll explain it like this...I felt revictimized. In my estimation four officers spent their time questioning me instead of any resources attempting to locate the gunman actively getting away in my car.

The truth is even being forced to drive my attacker at gun point for approximately 25 minutes, I felt some degree of control in the sense I had some power to make a decision even as bad as all of the available options were pretty bad. At some point after exhausting everything I could think of to negotiate myself out of the situation safely (i.e. please just let me out and take my phone and wallet; I’m a lawyer maybe I can help you, you don’t need to do this), I accepted that very likely what was going on is I was being forced to drive to an isolated location where I would be shot and my body wouldn’t be found.

Accepting something like that as reality is actually empowering - and I even testified to this - I considered driving my car into a concrete median on the highway at high speed; making a move to grab the gun and fight; I considered driving my car off the shoulder of the highway down a grassy hill and trying to roll out. And these were very real possibilities and options I could have attempted thinking at least if I lived I would get medical treatment quickly if this happened on I-95 and he would likely get caught...which I felt was unlikely if I allowed the entire thing to play out in some isolated location. At the end the gunman forced me to exit the highway and I made my move when being directed to do a u-turn at an intersection.

So you have to consider I’m not trained for any of this, but still I felt somewhat in control in the sense that I could make a choice. And when I escaped I felt some degree of elation, because of all my options I ended up picking one that got me away from a gunman relatively unharmed physically considering. But then I felt instead of pursing this gunman who was making an active get away in my car there were 4 officers busy questioning me the most senior of them setting the tone for the rest by basically telling me I’m full of shit before even speaking with me. I felt more victimized than with the gunman, because the reality was I had no options, I had no recourse, and in my mind their own bias ensured this guy would safely make a get away in my car (which he did). So based on nothing more than how the one officer treated me I felt more victimized by them than the gunman, because I actually had less power.

I went from feeling I made the right choice by escaping, to thinking I did the wrong thing and that what I should have done is try to fight and take the gun...godforbid something like this ever takes place again, it is very likely I will take that option, knowing full well life isn’t some movie where the good guy always wins.

And it’s not just about me but about the next victim and how they are treated, maybe it’s a woman escaping a sexually motivated attacker and this officer asking why she is dressed so provocatively if she didn’t want it. Chilling effects are real, and telling a victim they are lying as the first words out of your mouth while showing zero interest in pursuing the suspect making an active getaway from the scene sets the tone. Then again it was this slight (perceived or not) that resulted in me locating the suspect with 24 hours, even with a location from a stolen iPad there was an initial refusal for the police to go to the location, it was me who drove to the location and confirmed my vehicle location and the gunman, and that burden really should not have been on me, I should have felt confident the police would find this guy especially when I provided them with a location from my iPad that happened to be in the car. So you tell me, did they refuse to help me?

It was unbecoming of their professional standards (even off-duty) and he's representing the community. It even made the news (how I heard about it).

So remember, there are plenty of good cops and good forces out there. It's just the shit ones never get held accountable.

1. If I have my phone on and recording, the police can seize it (ie, grab it from me). At best, I'd be able to turn it off, but it's been shown multiple times that they can force me to provide my fingerprint to unlock it.

2. If I turn my phone off (so they need my pin, which they can't force from me), I can't record.

What if they gave a third group a prominently visible dummy body cam that did not record, and the police officer knew it, but to others it would look like there was a body cam?

And possibly a fourth group a working body cam that was barely visible to others?

With variations like these, one might be able to tease out more information about the causal relationships.

I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it?

In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved.

Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.

As another commented pointed out downthread, you can hear them on accidentally-recorded video saying things like "We're still red here! Be careful!" when planting evidence/stealing stuff/whatever.

Disclaimer: I think both street protesters/identity politics activists and the police are basically run by assholes.

Note well: I am not saying that we should lower the standard of behavior that we expect police to abide by. I am merely saying that, in the real world, almost decent is probably the best we can actually find.

It doesn't sound like you are "open to evidence to the contrary". Those words seem to dismiss such evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Take a wild guess on what those have in common with police officers.

People that are constantly exposed to highly stressful situations tend to develop psychological problems.

It sort of barely controls for age, which finds lower violence when the officers are older.

But it's not very convincing. Anecdotally it seems like there is a domestic violence problem in the population, but you can't compare it to the general population. You need to control for education, background, and socioeconomic status.

> Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience?

Probably also a factor, but that's also not representative and subject to perceptual biases.

It's strange to me that, when faced with problems of official power vs privacy, people never seem to remember the idea of warrants, which are baked into our legal system and have been used to address privacy problems for centuries.

Why would there be any expectation of privacy for public officials?

If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition.

In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.

What is the connection between enforcement of statutory code and medical aid / emergency response? Why do these social services need to be delivered by LEOs?

At my college, one of the best things my student government did was first response in cases of rape and sexual assault. We had a phone number that people were able to call and get a response from a peer who had been trained in the next steps of response, allowing the victim to gain composure and support before dealing with the law enforcement apparatus.

We had a similar service for cases of mental health / psychedelic emergency.

There is no reason that law enforcement need to be first responders in cases of medical emergency.

Unless we're talking about walking back the Peelian principles (and arguably all that is good about western notions of liberty), it is a continuing imperative to ensure that police officers can strictly enforce the law and do so in full public view.

Having people re-victimized by turning their pleas for help into entertainment is bullshit.

Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is obscene.