This is a good step in the right direction. What I would ultimately like to see is mandatory, impossible to shut off, police wide body cameras. There is no reason in this day and age to not have it.
If we have cameras in that situation, the PO will have no choice but to issue a summons to the person and then potentially have to show up in court if the person requests it.
Is that the best use of our police officers and the courts time? I think your intention is to provide citizens protection against police abuse of our rights but I think that the situation is more complex and getting the right mix of tech and humanity in police practices requires better training and education of both the police and the citizenry.
I agree with your point tho, bureaucracy has trouble thinking about edge cases, it's hard to create a complete spec of things like not requiring bringing someone in for an open beer if they aren't clearly drunk
It is very much the job of the courts to interpret the law with respect to those edge cases and their judgements can provide guidance to politicians about how to more narrowly define the law. This is how things are supposed to work _in theory_.
They only review the videos if there's an incident or complaint. So it's not like there's someone watching 40 x 8 hour videos every day.
/this is a smaller rural area in the midwest US, so ymmv but these officers do use discretion and the higher ups don't care if it's nothing big. In the Chief's words, "we were all young and stupid at some point."
Right now there isn't, but some day, a computer might be able to do it.
Doesn't overlooking the beer also mean we've decided it's ok for teens to drink? What is the difference you see?
So it really comes down to philosophically purity vs. pragmatism. I'm naturally drawn toward the former, but as I've gotten older I see more value in the latter, even tho intellectual it bothers me.
...unless they're black?
There's no reason to give cops this discretion, it just leads to unfair policing practices. Better to have police enforce all laws and think hard about what we want those laws to be.
This is what I was alluding to. Historically judges have had a lot of leeway when it comes to sentencing, and, having heard all the details of the case, they are in the best position to decide the defendant's fate. (For what it's worth, I disagree with mandatory minimum sentencing laws.)
Presumably the footage is archived and only reviewed for disputes, court, etc.
https://genius.com/Dave-chappelle-killin-them-softly-annotat...
Instead, there should be extremely strong disincentives (such as being fired, barred from working in law enforcement, jail time, etc) for an officer to turn off their body cam when interacting with the public.
Citizens should also be able to know whether the camera is on (blinking red light etc) and be able to report instances where it was not.
And realistically the footage that's of interest isn't going to be those personal moments (or overhearing a call with the officer's family, say) it's the ones where the officer is engaging with a member of the public. And maybe limit viewing access to in-person, by court order, or to credentialed journalists or something.
"footage that's of interest isn't going to be those personal moments" is basically the "nothing to hide" argument against privacy, which I reject.
Sure there is, there are enormous privacy concerns with how police body cameras can be used, and barely any of the departments which have adopted them have reasonable policies for governing that. What about interviewing vulnerable victims? How do you handle FOI requests? What about the departments that want to incorporate facial recognition into their body camera program? Would you like the police to have a database of your movements, or the political events you attend? None of this even addresses the fact that these programs have also largely failed to provide the transparency and accountability they promised. I’m not arguing for one side or the other, but to claim there are no reasons against them is dismissive and ignorant.
I think cops should always have a light on when they are recording; that provides check for people to know when they are or are not being recorded.
When recording is activated, a pure 1-second tone should sound, with an audible voice indicator "bodycam number ### recording" with a timestamp and location. When recording is deactivated, a 1-second series of short chirps , with an audible voice indicator "bodycam number ### deactivating in 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, off".
That way, if a cop is turning off the camera at an inappropriate time, someone else can start recording before it cuts off, or the cop can cancel the deactivation without interrupting the recording, and if a suspect hears or sees all cops turning off their cameras at once, they might have a possible defense for resisting arrest. Furthermore, the recording of one cop's camera would be able to show if another cop's camera was on or off.
Ultrasonic tones outside the range of human hearing could encode "bodycam ### is recording" or "bodycam ### is not recording" or "bodycam ### case has been opened", so that any available audio recording without a high-frequency filter could decode it enough for a lawyer to request preservation of evidence from that specific camera and then later get the full video.
Still a lot less questions than officer testimony.
If you're ever on a jury, reject police testimony as a basis for determining guilt!