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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams.

That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

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I think maybe it was downvoted because it misses the point, just as the article misses the point. Behavior change would be nice but the real benefit here is accountability. So what if there were 1.6% (made up number) rate of reported bad behaviors, and now the rate is still 1.6% -- the point is that in those 1.6% of cases, there is now the best kind of evidence to ensure that the facts are represented accurately when these cases are adjudicated. That accurate portrayal of facts will actually protect both cops and citizens.

Yes, this is the real benefit. It's no longer the police's word against the defendant, which nearly always goes the way of the police in a court of law.

Accountability is key.

That's not necessarily true. I've seen juries dismiss charges that came down to word vs word.

>Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.

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.

Only millions? No problem at all.

Let's revise that estimate, though.

765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million.

At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year.

Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing officers. That's a billion dollars per year.

So I'll go with a cost estimate of 1.3 - 1.5 billion per year for cameras for all police officers.

Is that worth it? I think so.

$1000 is way too high. I bought a helmet cam in 2009 that was designed for military applications (fairly robust, easy to change AA batteries) and it cost about $300-400 back then. Looking for fairly robust cameras I can see that the action camera in Olympus Tough lineup is currently selling for $350. I've seen other cameras in this product line take a good beating and come out fine.

Obviously there would be additional costs (memory cards, readers, batteries, chargers, harness, etc) but I don't see why it would come to more than $500-600 per person at most.

About $450 a pop with dock. Storage is expensive though. Cameras on all times and retention for 90 days is what this particular department had.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-09-24/police-wei...

Why is the lifetime so short? Are the batteries non-replaceable? I'd definitely be looking into replacing worn out batteries on $1000 devices.

Oh, it will probably go down over time, but remember that police departments aren't going to go out and buy $399 Go-Pros.

No, they'll be buying tactical harnesses and military-tough specially cased relabeled $299 Go-Pros for $999 for each complete system, from a certified minority-owned business in partnership with Halliburton.

The way you chained that together was almost musical.

And yet many people don’t on their phones that cost close to this.

Back in the days when you could replace the batteries on most phones they would be badly obsolete and unsupported in 3 years. Even today it's a bit iffy on spending the $50 to replace a battery in a 3 year old Android phone.

A camera won't become obsolete nearly as fast. Assuming the cops shoot in HD today (it would be really dumb if they didn't) then that will still be HD tomorrow. Maybe not 4k, but honestly I don't think 4k brings a lot to the table at this time in this application.

I disagree, human vision is pretty amazing with a huge field of view and while the amount of detail is only really high at the center of vision to match what an officer can make out you'd pretty much need a lot of detail everywhere. I don't think we'll see affordable 4k body cameras for a while but there's definitely benefits to recording in 4k.

Those he said/she said events can turn into multi-million dollar lawsuits really quickly. It only takes a couple of incidents for the cameras to pay for themselves.

The data storage issue is definitely a concern, but I think it is one that can be effectively managed.

wait but wouldn't the states have to pay for those lawsuits if the video evidence showed the cop doing the thing? Ohh I guess the narrative is that the police is most often wrongfully accused of wrongdoing, costing the state millions, which the cameras could help to clear up. Fnord.

An economic solution lies in wait. What is the impact of settlements in "he said / she said" cases resolved in the defendant's favor? Is it "millions of dollars each year"?

I don't know if that works... I mean, even if it's millions of $ each year that PD have to settle/pay, why does it hurt them? Aren't they simply going to pass that cost back to the taxpayers?

Police departments have budgets, not blank checks. If the police come to the local government saying they need an extra umpty-million this year because they keep getting sued for brutality, questions are going to be asked.

Certainly, but at the end of the day, they'll say: "well if we don't get $x then we will have to cut the force. If we don't pay our officers, they are just going to leave." What do you do then? You can fire people you hold accountable, but that isn't going to fix your budget situation: if you don't fund the PD, the services are going to be cut, and taxpayers are going to be impacted.

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