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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

More accountability for police can't hurt. In other private professions bad accountability results in loss of job, so I don't think many can complain about this.

A cool feature, maybe given attention due to the hot political climate around cop shootings. But useful nonetheless.

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I think all police should wear body cameras. Police misconduct declines. Civilian misconduct declines. Cameras are a potential source of powerful evidence. Everyone wins.

Police DO wear body cameras! For example, there was a shooting in Albuquerque, with five police officers present, and all five officers were wearing cameras.

Unfortunately, all five cameras malfunctioned at exactly the same time and none of them captured footage of the shooting [1].

What a crazy, unlikely circumstance.

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180624/18081640105/anoth...

It seems only reasonable that in such cases not only are the police guilty by default of whatever they're accused of, they're also guilty of destroying evidence and should be charged accordingly.

While I agree there was probably not malfunction of five cameras simultaneously the presumption of innocence is too important to our society to undermine it in any situation, even this one. We must find the evidence that the cameras were sabotaged or otherwise lost their data. No issue is worth undermining our basic principles.

Only if you can prove the malfeasance.

When all five body cameras "happened" to fail at the same time I don't think anyone can really doubt the malfeasance.

Yeah, but who did it? All five of them, one of them, another cop not at the scene but with access to the system? Contractors with system access? It's not enough to be sure that a crime happened. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be an investigation or measures taken to make it harder to happen.

And to be more careful, what's the failure rate on those cameras and how many incidents happen a year where it would look suspicious if all cameras fail? If the numbers are high enough we might just have selection bias.

The officers should be on the hook for their video feed.

"can really doubt" doesn't work in court, though. Innocent until proven guilty and all that - if there's no actual evidence of tampering you'd struggle to win a conviction.

While likely that is the case, unless there are ways to detect tampering built into the camera, it can't be proved in a court

And when that black guy that was just gunned down "happened" to have a knife in his pocket when searched there's no doubt that he was only seconds away from using it to attack the police?

Sounds like there should be a rule: If your camera isn't recording, you aren't on duty.

Yeah I'm calling this badge-equivalence. The camera (with active indicator light) is the badge. If you don't have a badge you're not a police officer. If you don't have a camera you're not a police officer. The only thing that curbs my enthusiasm for this is the privacy rights of other parties. Not sure how to deal with that but I don't think it should derail the whole thing.

There’s a trial going on right now where a police officer shot an unarmed teenager 16 times and it was recorded on a dash cam and the police officer is saying it didn’t happen the way the footage clearly shows it did: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2015/nov/24/chicag...

There have been other shooting of unarmed black boys and men that have been recorded on video and the cops isn’t held accountable.

Hopefully, that’s starting to change, but having a shooting on video is no guarantee that anyone will be held accountable.

He was not unarmed, he was carrying a knife. Toxicology reports showed traces of PCP in his system. Furthermore the police were responding to reports of someone breaking into vehicles and brandishing a knife.

That said, the police did not act reasonably and then attempted to cover it up.

But it's a good start - at least now everyone can see clear proof that the officer is lying. Even if he isn't charged, everyone knows there's a miscarriage of justice going on. In the past his version would be the accepted one and that would be it, no one would even write an article about it.

Police misconduct declines.

Except when they try to fake video evidence:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/baltimore-police-video...

He was only caught because he forgot that the previous 30 seconds prior to pressing "record" are buffered and will be included in the video.

Me too, but I wish that data was tightly controlled by a federal regulator, and deleted after N days.

At the moment, most of it’s controlled by Tazer, who have an interest in keeping cops happy.

From what I understand at the moment the problem is that many police precincts in the US cannot afford them (since they don't get enough funding -- you need to hire people to sort through the footage as well as licensing the hardware and software from Tazer and so on).

Quite a few cops who participated in trials of body cameras were super positive about them (and wished they could keep them) since it also protects them in cases where they are wrongly accused of some sort of malpractice. But in many cases they are too expensive to be able to roll out country-wide and few people want to pay more taxes.

> From what I understand at the moment the problem is that many police precincts in the US cannot afford them (since they don't get enough funding -- you need to hire people to sort through the footage as well as licensing the hardware and software from Tazer and so on).

This has little to do with taxes and more to do with priorities. Thanks to civil asset forfeiture the money is absolutely there for many police forces, but they would need to prioritize this over the acquisition of armored tanks and other militarization programs.

Great, then sell (or don't initially waste money on) the SWAT team's LAV and cell phone jamming gear to fund the body cameras.

Check out a youtube channel called "PoliceActivity".

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