And even assuming the footage isn't automatically public, what about the evidentiary value against the house's occupants? Currently, police need a warrant to execute a search of someone's residence, but there's a "plain view" exception: if while the officer is in the house anyway (either because the occupant let them in, or because they entered due to exigent circumstances like a violent crime in progress), if they happen to see evidence of a crime in plain view while there -- a gun, drugs, whatever -- they don't need a warrant to use that as evidence. If the officer has a camera on the whole time, that potentially means the officer could use not just what they happened to see in the moment, but retroactively whatever can be seen in the footage after the fact, which likely significantly expands the extent of plain-view evidence that can be used without a warrant. Some have asserted that video-recording itself constitutes a fourth-amendment search if the officer is someplace where the person has an expectation of privacy, though I don't think this question has been adjudicated.
Also, in two-party-consent states, capturing body camera audio might also require either a warrant or consent for the capturing of at least some kinds of interactions.
I think body cams are net-good, but it's more complicated than it seems at first blush.
Public records laws already generally anticipate that public records will frequently contain sensitive, protected data and have general processes (involving redaction or denial of unprivileged general public access, depending on the circumstances) for handling public records to which that applies (source: spent a couple decades in government dealing with public records containing PHI, other PII, and other legally restricted-access information.)
If you watch BWC footage on the completely public COPA (the civilian office of police accountability, an organization empowered by the govt of the city of Chicago to investigate complaints against CPD) case portal [0], you'll see a lot of intimate, unredacted footage, BWC and otherwise.
I don't think the privacy laws have caught up with the tech. Or maybe the privacy is sacrificed in the name of transparency and accountability. I was not in the room where these decisions where made, so I couldn't say.
The situation remains that law enforcement has no real checks on their own power, and they've moved to restrict or block such checks on their power.
Change the "plain view" exception to only apply to stuff the officer notices while physically there; if they see it in footage later, it's not admissible in court, and not grounds for a search warrant. Change the recording-consent laws to not apply to police body cameras.
And regarding privacy, have retention policies: if there's no legal hold on some body cam footage (part of an active investigation or court proceeding, etc.), it gets deleted after 90 days (or whatever time period sounds reasonable). That way we don't have recordings of people's private residences living in storage indefinitely.
The footage must be recorded and retained, with the decision to edit and/or release it left up to courts or other independent authorities.
As for two-party laws, those have to go. They don't have a place in a society where the people need the ability to hold police and other officials accountable. If the police are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, right? Isn't that what they tell us?
The courts can decide when it's appropriate for the footage to be viewed where privacy concerns exist. They can't do that if the footage never existed in the first place... but they will cheerfully take the officer's word regarding what he saw. It's misguided at best to think that this state of affairs is preferable from a privacy and security standpoint.
> The courts can decide when it's appropriate for the footage to be viewed where privacy concerns exist
Any data that is recorded will be made public eventually, one way or another, which is why it shouldn't be recorded in the first place.
It's certainly one of those jobs that I could never do. I have nothing but respect for ethical, professional LEOs. They are among the people who will benefit the most from having a full AV record of their interactions with the public.
If they could see it (real or imagined) and arrest you for it, having a camera to prove if they could or could not even actually see it seems like a pretty reasonable safeguard!
Of course the video will be admissible as evidence. It’s a lot better in fact than relying on the officers memory.
I’d much rather innocent people are exonerated based on video than that guilty people go free because a police officer happened to miss the evidence of a crime.
What are we even talking about here?
If you are being stopped by police, you are generally already not doing that voluntarily, so saying you need consent to record audio or video in such a situation strikes me as weird too.
The officer has the opportunity to plant drugs if he is not being recorded.
It's because the body cameras that are bought by police departments aren't marketed as devices that keep cops honest, but as devices that protect them from the lying public. That's why they're sold with features that allow the wearer to turn them on and off, and with buttons that trigger the camera to only capture small clips of video. Cops only want to turn them on when they feel like they might need to prove something in court later.
I've seen this claim pretty frequently, but never any actual data, so I started tracking the stats in my own city.
Since I started ~January, there have been 25 police shootings/use of force events(this includes things like tazing, bean bags, and punches/kicks that require medical treatment. It doesn't include violence against animals or desk pops/negligent discharges). 23 out of 25 events had bodycam footage. The two that didn't both involved off-duty officers, which I think is a reasonable exception to body cam rules. There were no instances of "malfunctioning" body cams, dead batteries, or officers who "forgot" to activate their cams.
Even though 6 months of data from one city isn't enough to make any sweeping statements, I haven't found any studies more thorough than my own spreadsheet. If you know of any please send them my way!
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-20/22-of-la...
IMO that's a an oversimplification compared to what the report actually says[1]. The 22% number isn't how common it was for officers to not have their cameras on, it was how common it was for officers to have cameras that were off OR the camera was on but they were late in hitting the record button[2]. Situations where the officer just straight up didn't record were more rare (that happened 3.7% of the time and if you exclude one instance that was considered justified it's only 3.2%).
Funnily enough, LAPD is the department whose data I was tabulating (over a slightly different time period than this study). I think there's 2 main discrepancies between my numbers and the OIG report: I only counted if at least one officer present had body cam footage, not if every officer had body cam footage. Also, I still counted it if the footage of the shooting/use of force was in the 2 minute buffer.
[1]: https://a27e0481-a3d0-44b8-8142-1376cfbb6e32.filesusr.com/ug...
[2]: Keep in mind that just because they were late to hit the record button doesn't mean the shooting wasn't captured on camera. If an officer talks to witness to ask where a suspect went, radios for help, activates the camera, finds the suspect and then a shooting occurs, they'd be considered non-compliant (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDThHbrtQE4&t=355s). And even if the officer doesn't activate the camera until after a shooting, it'll still be captured in the 2 minute buffer (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT4Ss6ASOrE&t=3m30s)
Otherwise, they can inform their victim/perp that they are going to execute them and then turn the camera on for the few seconds before as a warning to anyone who would challenge them. Is this not a corner case you considered?
B) At least for CPD, the main thing BWC footage does is exonerate officers from unfounded complaints. Most officers have really embraced BWC as it regularly shields them from having to pay out on lawsuits. And when footage should exist on an event number but doesn't, that leaves an officer pretty wide open to having to pay out of pocket.
C) What instances are you thinking of regarding your claim that cameras are "almost always off whenever something controversial happens"?
https://roguerocket.com/2021/07/26/wisconsin-police-deny-pla...
It depends on the jurisdiction. In some police departments, turning off a body camera is a punishable offense, up to and including firing.
It's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and override the local police union's resistance, if possible.
If it came down to it being absolutely essential, you could have one office take the camera off (but leave it running), and hand it to their partner to point at the bathroom door as that officer enters and uses the bathroom, and they put it back on as they exit the bathroom.
The whole point of a camera system is to be a reliable audit trail of interactions that police have been in, for both their benefit and the public's benefit. Every exception you allow that lets things happen without the camera is a problem for an audit, so you try to reduce those as much as possible.
This is probably the most foolproof. The fabric idea wouldn't be a good idea considering many public restrooms are multi-person. So the concern is with the privacy of others, not just the officer.
I understand that's probably a hard sell though, as people have some idea that it's verboten to record in the open space of a public restroom (it's definitely frowned upon, but I think police cameras are a good exception to have, especially if they need to enter the restroom to perform their jobs because that's where a disturbance is), so whatever gets more camera use in the end I'm on board with, from a practical standpoint.
They expect that the law should be followed, which stipulates no recording. Companies have tried for a long time to have security cameras in bathrooms, but it's not allowed. Now if they're responding to a call, then maybe that's an exception. Or they could change the law to allow recording in the bathroom, but there will probably be a ton of public pushback.
I think (but could be wrong) what most people actually care about is that their stall is private (or in the case of urinals, that someone isn't to the side recording what they consider a small private wall space area), but since that's hard to account for and some stalls/urinals already have poor privacy to the rest of the bathroom, we got what we have now.
Honestly, to me it seems like a lot of bother to hide bits of our body that we should all be a lot less concerned about shame about in the first place, but I'm not holding my breath on any change there in the U.S.
I agree with this, for many laws really.
If a man at a baseball game went into the restroom and up to the trough holding a smartphone that was clearly recording, he would undoubtedly find trouble. People expect not to be recorded in the bathroom.
Yes, they could change the laws about recording. In many cases, not just for police, they probably should.
Armed law enforcement responding to calls without an evident need for armed law enforcement is itself a problem.
On the other hand, asking someone to go into a situation that may put themselves at risk (for some cases of welfare checks) without appropriate training or equipment (or leaving the distinction of which is which to some third party not on the scene) doesn't seem like a good idea either, and at the point where you have a force that's equipped to protect themselves and possibly restrain others, that begins to sounds a lot like a police force, so I can see why they just use the police.
There's probably some solutions along the lines of different shifts for those with different training with different load outs, or additional trained personnel in sets of police, but all of those also have some problems I can see and don't address officers being dispatched that are prone to use force because of a prior altercation that day/week or trauma at some prior date.
It’s fairly obvious that in a country where citizens are free to be armed, police must be armed too.
Police should enforce the law/investigate crimes.
Teachers should teach.
If we're going to have social welfare programs, we need to provide personnel to do that work, not pile it upon other professions as an unwanted secondary responsibility.
There could be police who want it as a responsibility as long as they are trained and compensated. That is another possibility.
Even granting that for the sake of argument, it is less obvious that government-public interactions not for the purposes of arresting criminals or otherwise responding to or preventing apparent actual or imminent crime need to involve police.
That said, there is no also no reason at all not to have specialized police who do actually have mental health and de-escalation training.
But again I agree - there should be other options for government/public interaction.
>It's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and override the local police union's resistance, if possible.
It's only possible in jurisdictions where DAs and/or Mayors can get elected without an endorsement from law-enforcement, and look at SF for an example of what police do when one slips through the cracks.
By far, most US government is ruled by law enforcement, not the other way around, and this isn't even touching the nationwide police rebellion we've been enduring.
As someone who doesn't live in SF, what are some of the examples? This is a good faith question, but I'm not really sure what I would google to know what you mean.
Pretty shameful that Mayor Alioto override the Supes and caved to the police's demands rather than calling in the National Guard and taking the entire striking force into custody. But I guess people don't always make the best decisions while their lives are being threatened...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Police_Departmen...
Find a news story about the current crime rate in SF that isn't framed by comments from carceral interests: the police, the police union, former police officers, former hardline prosecutors, and aspiring hardline prosecutors. Many if not most stories only talk to those people.
You may be surprised at the difficulty in finding an even-handed appraisal.
The general problem of media assuming good-faith information from police is widespread and SF is no different from any other location in the US (or Canada for that matter).
This is probably a decent start: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/14/bogus-bac...
One could propose a system where recording is triggered automatically when leaving the patrol car (BLE dongle) and can only be reset by a centralized authority.
I don't see how it's too different from stores recording their cashiers 24/7.
Can we actually charge the cam through the officers uniform while he sits at his seat?
There's no reason to treat cops as second-class citizens. There's no evidence to suggest widespread power-abuse, despite all the FUD from BLM. Are there some bad apples? Sure, but there are bad apples in every profession and steps like that only punish good officers and make corrupt officers more careful when they perform misdeeds.
You cannot neuter the power of every profession of authority. All you're going to do is build instinctive and reflexive mistrust of anyone in authority before they've done anything wrong, just like the reflexive mistrust BLM has whenever anyone interacts with an African-American.
> but there are bad apples in every profession
A "bad apple" software engineer probably over-reports hours or is neglectful in their job. A "bad apple" cashier probably skims off the top of sales. A "bad apple" executive probably enriches their personal wealth.
A "bad apple" cop probably results in ruining the lives of other people through wrongful arrests, excessive force, or other means.
Some people simply should be held to a higher standard because of the responsibilities of their position. When you can quite literally be the arbiter of life and death at times, you should be held to a higher standard.
Yet the actual old folk wisdom was "one bad apple can spoil the barrel," or as Benjamin Franklin rephrased it in Poor Richard's Almanack, "the rotten apple spoils his companion." The entire point is that we don't get to just say "it's one bad apple." A barrel with one bad apple in it quickly becomes a barrel of bad apples.
The uproar we've seen isn't just about example after example of police brutality, poor treatment of minorities, and abuse of power. It's about the overwhelming resistance among the police to change, to accountability, even to self-examination. It's about how the reaction, by and large, to "bad apples" isn't to say "we need to get rid of that one," but rather to say "we need to protect our own."
We don't treat police as second-class citizens; we entrust them with extraordinary power and latitude. In return, shouldn't we be holding them to an extraordinarily high standard?
What seems to be missing is the populist support on both sides.
Imagine you're a police officer standing next to a 'bad apple' - you should be put in a situation where helping to prosecute the 'bad apple' is the easiest option for you to take. I don't think it's that easy. I've had plenty of jobs where I was working with an arseshole, but I've never taken it to HR. Maybe most I've ever done, is just ensured I don't have to work near them - solves my problem.
Police reform has been tagged Blue Team populism, so Red Team populists oppose it on principle.
I think we definitely should do that, agreed, but when we're talking about people who are empowered to deprive others of their freedom -- or even their lives -- I want more than just "we've fixed our hiring practices and training to ensure our officers are trustworthy". Sure, ok, great, but I want more than just your word on it. I want controls put in place to reduce the possibility of abuses, and when there are abuses, I want it to be difficult for there to be no record of those abuses.
> There's no reason to treat cops as second-class citizens.
This sort of verification and monitoring would not be unique to a police force. The whole "second-class citizens" thing is just FUD and an attempt to distract from the problem at hand. Any government agency that deals with sensitive information has controls in place to try to stop bad employees from doing bad things. Some companies do that too, depending on the kind of stuff they deal with. That extends to other sorts of controls, like at most tech companies, most employees should not have access to billing information, or even deployment permissions for services not owned by their teams. Some of this is just to prevent mistakes, but these controls are also there to prevent malicious employees from doing bad things. I believe some of the ISO and security certifications my company has requires controls like this, even.
which goes into great detail many different times where police abuse power, and why things need to change.
It's farcical to suppose that recording their conduct an essential element of accountability is a cross too heavy to bear when life and death and citizens freedom are on the line. Everyone should in fact have a reflexive mistrust of authority because the majority of the human race lacks much of an internal moral compass and can be said to be "good" mostly within the confines of a function system that holds people accountable for meeting objective standards and worse power attracts the corruptible.
You could do well to delete half the buzzwords from your post and come up with reasons in their place.