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.
>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...
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.