Study finds police body cameras had no significant impact on use of force | Hacker News Reader

Study finds police body cameras had no significant impact on use of force

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42 pointsDyslexicAtheist57 comments

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IMHO it seems that the body cameras are quite frequently "malfunctioning" when they would be needed.

edit: some links from quick google search.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/19/us/minneapolis-police-shoo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/a-cop-fir...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-baton-rouge-shoot...

It's quite possible they are functioning just as often when not needed, and that this only seems malicious because of selection bias.

And guess who does the selection bias on the on/off button.

This only matters if you assume malicious intent. I'm not saying it isn't ever there, but let's not pretend it's proven to be statistically significant.

Malicious intent must be assumed. The body cameras exist in order to be a deterrent to malicious police behaviors and as such any system which puts the officers in charge of the functioning of the cameras, and which does not heavily discourage or prevent police from operating with a broken or malfunctioning camera is failing in its primary mission. It should be illegal for an officer to operate or be on duty with a broken or otherwise non-functioning body camera, and the footage from body cameras should be held by an independent third party that is not subject to oversight or control by the police (FBI might not be a bad idea).

Ironic, given that a core tenant of our justice system is "innocent until proven guilty".

All of the things you mention are "wishlist" items right now.

Lets assume this is true (and honestly, I'd love for it to be true).

>It should be illegal for an officer to operate or be on duty with a broken or otherwise non-functioning body camera

So now that you have that law, how do you enforce it?

How does a department verify that they're complying?

How does any individual officer know whether his camera is working or malfunctioning?

How do they correct the problem if it's a technically complex issue related to camera infrastructure or hardware?

How much additional burden does this place on each department?

How do those departments pay for that added burden?

----

So can we put a system in place that satisfies your very high standard? Almost certainly yes.

Should we? I don't know.

Will we? Almost certainly not. At least not in the immediate future. It's expensive and hard.

Obviously there's the question of how foolproof you want the system to be, but at a minimum there should be some system that monitors and confirms it's receiving at least a heartbeat signal from the camera and that the camera is reporting normal functioning. If the camera drops out police dispatch should be notified who in turn should notify the officer that he needs to return to the station to have his camera replaced. One possibly more passive solution that others have mentioned is to simply discount any testimony an officer provides that doesn't have an operating camera to corroborate his statements and instead defer to non-law enforcement testimony in those cases instead of the current situation where an officer is always considered more trustworthy than anyone else. That provides very strong incentive for police to insure their cameras are working because in the event they aren't any testimony they provide would be more or less nullified and likely lose them cases.

This is like a nightmare scenario. Criminal testimony should be given more weight than the police? Madness.

Sorry for the irrelevant response but: s/tenant/tenet/

Not just you, I recently read “All information should be free” was a core tenant of the hacker culture at MIT.[0] Don't tell me it's becoming proper English!

A tenant is a person who holds lands; a tenet is something held to be true. I didn't realize until learning Spanish that ten and tain in English words means to have/hold! Their verb 'to have' is tener (Latin: tenere). Maintain is mantener; also there's contener, detener, obtener, retener, sostener...

[0] http://ctankersley.com/2017/01/04/the-history-of-open-source...

I agree an independent body should own the audit process. It's a common sense best practice. What I'm saying is, I don't think we'll find it makes a significant difference. Most cops are trying to do a good job and keep our streets safe and will not be "deterred" from any specific behavior. When mistakes do happen, we'll continue to judge actions in a court of public opinion, where all are guilty until proven innocent.

Surprise!

You can’t expect to extract any value from cameras under police control.

The cameras must exist beyond the reach of police departments, and publish footage in a way that cannot be censored.

The body cameras get censored because the police have created a system that benefits them, above all else.

The reality of this outcome should weigh heavily on everyone’s mind, about how this correlates with every other aspect of police activity.

This summer, an officer in Maryland accidentally taped himself planting drugs. This case alone justifies the continued use of cameras (especially without the on/off button). Cameras should be under direct control of the judiciary, available to defense and not merely the district attorney's office.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-bod...

Allowing the police to have total control and oversight was, to me, the point where I knew the police body camera idea wasn't going to fix everything right away. It feels like mostly lip service but it has shown some good splotches here and there. LIke you said, until they are out of the hands of police they are basically useless... Unless buffoon cops forget to turn it on / off depending on the situation.

I would say if an officer has their camera off in line of duty, and something happens they should be charged with obstruction of justice.

Exactly my theory. Make any accusation by citizens against police have more weight over the cops' words in a court of law (they are after all "serving the people", no?), and they will find it in their best interest to keep the camera on at all times.

What if they need to go to the bathroom?

They should have to request it over the radio and the camera should be remotely disabled. This would mean they couldn't turn it off in mere seconds in the heat of the moment or right after taking a call before it was resolved. It's not a perfect solution but it's pretty good.

Another option would be for the "off" button to mark that section of the tape as "off duty" and store it in a special archive that required a court order to access. That way the only time we would need to look is if there was some issue where there was an empty spot in the recording during an event where they were clearly not "off duty".

I think it's worth pointing out that while using the bathroom I don't think a chest/shoulder mounted body cam would see much, if anything, inappropriate. It's not attached to their head looking where they look.

Try not to assault anyone in the stalls?

OK, the above is slightly tongue in cheek, I know, but this seems like a fairly weak "what if". We're primarily talking about confrontational incidents of conflict where there's issues of trust around accounts of events. The majority of these incidents will hopefully not take place during toilet breaks.

Then they should briefly go off duty... I fail to see an issue here.

If I was interviewing you and I told you that if your laptop stopped working during office hours you could be brought up on criminal charges that could include jail time - would you take the job?

If your DLP mysteriously turns off and then corporate data gets leaked you could be brought up on criminal charges that could include jail time. Which is the present scenario nearly all of us are in.

More like if your laptop stops working you are obligated to call tech support immediately.

Well, I can’t shoot people to death and potentially get away with it at my job. If I was interviewing for a job where I literally held the power of life or death for other people, then yeah, I would probably expect some pretty strict controls on that power.

> and publish footage in a way that cannot be censored

Easier said than done. Police officers are often seeing people on the worst day of their life. It would be an incredible decrease in privacy and general dignity if all footage was just published uncensored.

If someone assaulted you and stole your cloths would you want a video online of you being interviewed about the experience with just a towel on (and probably a few scenes where you are completely naked before they get you the towel)? That is potentially an extreme example, but ever day police officers interact with innocent people and victims that don't deserve to have that experience made public domain.

In short, the police need some way to make sure some video is kept private.

Police abuse of power is a terrible thing. I have no doubt they are literally getting away with murder and framing people in many cases. But we have to remember that a vast majority of what officers do is to protect us and help us in our time of need.

In principle, it ought to be possible to ensure an encrypted version of all the video is always uploaded to some governmental servers that the police can not tamper with, where the video can only be accessed under appropriate circumstances by an appropriate authority.

You're abstracting a lot of your argument away. When are "appropriate circumstances?" Who is an "appropriate authority?" Surely not the police department? Or the DA? Those questions are the crux of the issue, not the medium on which the recordings are stored.

An appropriate authority is a judge, and appropriate circumstances are if and when it passes the requirements to be shown in court or accessed with a warrant.

You can create a system with authorization, ACL and an audit trail with justifications. It is less complicated to implement and can be audited after the fact.

When you need access to an information, the system ask a reason (a procedure number or something) the system can grant it or not and all is logged. You can have a third party or authority notified and they could grant access to more sensible information.

> Those questions are the crux of the issue, not the medium on which the recordings are stored.

They are definitely important, but remember that I was replying to a comment that implied the only option was for the video to be made publicly available, and my comment was primarily trying to say that was not the only option.

I'm not sure exactly what the appropriate circumstances/authority are -- not my area of expertise -- but I think ones must exist. I don't know if you're arguing against the idea that there is some appropriate circumstances/authority.

The related argument against this that I've seen from a few cops is that this also removes their ability to use discretion and not charge people. If somebody reports a crime and happens to have some drugs in their pocket and the police find them, they could have just ignored them or confiscated them and not charge the guy in pursuit of the greater good, but with the whole thing on tape, they essentially have to charge everything they see/find.

Is that an issue though? It's my understanding that police are allowed a lot of discretion as to whether or not they should charge someone with a crime. ianal, so genuinely asking

This argument makes no sense to me. Are police allowed to use discretion?

If Yes - then doing something they're already allowed to do on tape makes no difference.

If No - then either they shouldn't be doing it and tape stops them from doing something wrong. Or they should and laws can be updated to allow it.

Having things float in a legal grey area is terrible for society. If it isn't legal, make it fully legal and cops are now fully covered.

The video should be able to be presented in court, unaltered and verified for both parties involved, whenever the need comes up.

Or if anything, they should not be tampered with and disabling them should weigh heavily against the police in the courts - it's one of the few ways they can disprove excess violence and such.

The only place that can is the justice department which outranks the police. Which means you have to be really serious about bringing the case to court. That serves as a big deterrent since you don't know what kind of evidence has been recorded or if it is even useful.

The cameras are a positive step anyway. The political debate cannot help but be effected every time a cop is caught on video doing something shady, but nothing happens. Over time this repeated evidence will cause social change, even if it doesn't create justice for the particular victim of that particular moment.

But for cameras to be really effective a couple things need to happen:

1) They have to be on by default, and not turned on and off by the cop.

2) The video needs to be archived with a neutral party that can provide the raw source data to attorneys for both prosecution and defense on equal terms.

3) The law needs to change and juries need to change so that cops are actually held to the same standards of violence and self-defense as any other citizen. This is necessary for US police to claim to actually be civilian police, and not a military occupation. But nonetheless this last one will be the hardest and slowest change of the three.

Another data point:

"The presence of body-worn cameras caused police to refrain from the use of force even when its was necessary for self-protection."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-017-9311-5

Tl;dr here: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/942692766177480704

This article is a poster child for jumping to conclusions. It's just as possible that there's no impact because there aren't a significant number of violent actions performed by police with the mindset that it is not justified.

We seem to have a great understanding of the detachment with which a doctor needs to operate to handle a stressful and high stakes daily environment, but somehow totally lack this empathy when it comes to police.

There are many rationales for body cameras. Most are along the lines of providing better records of events such as interactions between the police and the public. Reducing use of force is usually not among the official rationales. However, one unofficial rationale is that body cameras may reduce unreported uses of force and again this goes back to the main rationale of providing a better record of police activities.

Yet a study in Las Vegas reports significant reduction in the use of force when body cameras are used: https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/IRM-2017-U-016112-Final.pd...

In fact, I think the DC report is the exception - cameras are having significant impact most everywhere else.

This signifies that the police in question don't believe their conduct is wrong. This definitely comes down to a problem that needs to be sorted with proper training and establishing proper protocols on how to deal with these situations.

Better than nothing, however?

Not really. The article states two huge downsides:

1) Privileged footage access by the police results in selective publication of parts of the video, creating false or distorted narratives;

2) Police cameras are cameras, so this results in increased surveillance.

I dont get number 2. There's already a police officer where the camera is, they themselves are surveillance. Id much prefer the camera. Especially if I did something wrong so it can be seen exactly what I did instead of the report being blown out of proportion to ensure the charges stick.

Right, but what about all the times that crimes aren't being committed? In Illinois, the law is that the cameras must be able to record 10 hours and must be on when not in the car or the officer is talking with a victim, witness or confidential informant and those individuals request the camera be turned off [0]. That means that whenever the office enters a private area, where one expects a reasonable amount of privacy, that privacy is gone as long as the officer if following the rules. There are, of course, private places that one would not expect privacy such as any business that states they are recording video.

[0] http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs4.asp?ActID=3662&Ch...

There exists no computer in the world that can combine the memory of hundred of thousands of police officers together. With video footage, that's not necessarily true.

Well, no, because they cost money. Every $1 spent on buying and maintaining useless cameras is $1 not spent on actual policing.

>Every $1 spent on buying and maintaining useless cameras is $1 not spent on actual policing.

So, much better than nothing?

If you dream of a Utopian land without police officers, I hear Somalia is gorgeous this time of year.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen..., Somalia has roughly the same number of police officers per capita as Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and South Korea.

I was curious about it, so I looked at the underlying data and fixed the numbers on the wikipedia page based on the latest UN data available. Based on that, the number of police per capita is actually considerably lower.

Welp, I've lost the point, but human knowledge has improved. I'll count that as an overall win?

Oh, just fewer. There’s probably less LE per capita in Scandinavia than there are in Somalia.

tl;dr: The problem isn't the "body cam". The problem is that the victims can't get at the body cam footage due to various rules put in place by departments and police unions.

... which implies the body cameras work, since why would they withhold information that exonerates them?

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

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

The "nothing to hide" argument is not relevant for a public servant whose job, by definition, is occurring in public.

Since we give police more power than the average citizen, the more appropriate argument would be: "Who will guard the guards themselves?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

At then end of the day, the appropriate answer in a Democratic system must eventually be "the people, themselves".

Body cams don't magically make police better. But, without them, you can't even begin the process.

The day Schmidt releases recordings of himself having sex for all to see is the day that I'll take that quote seriously. There's a mountain of things we do that are good for us to keep secret from others.

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