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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

From what I've seen, the cameras don't really catch those angles to give video on that, and even if they did, that's a problem easily solved through a piece of fabric around the problematic area (as opposed to on the camera, which could be accidentally left in place). Beyond that, requiring sounds from the bathroom be audible is not too much to ask, IMO.

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.

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"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."

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.

That's a good point. At the same time I'm not sure what level of privacy people expect in a public bathroom. Anything you don't want someone seeing should be done within a stall. At best I would consider a public restroom as having increased privacy, but by no means being private.

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.

"At the same time I'm not sure what level of privacy people expect in a public bathroom."

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'm not saying the law should be ignored. I'm just not entirely sure why the law exists as it does, or think that it's ill written to account for certain situations. A large bathroom with twenty people (or more! bathrooms at large events or in large airports can be big) in it is not what I would consider private.

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.

"or think that it's ill written to account for certain situations."

I agree with this, for many laws really.

Perhapes we should just require the camera to be turned on and on their person for them to have the legal privileges and protections that we grant to law officers. If they turn it off or leave it behind for example during a restroom break then they are, under the eyes of the law, a civilian until it is turned back on. and any evidence "found" somewhere that they had gone without the camera while off the clock as it were is either inadmissible or must have a hire bar to be able to be used. so on planting drugs on a piss break to just walk in again with the camera on and "find it"

This seems like the most straightforward way to handle this.

> At the same time I'm not sure what level of privacy people expect in a public bathroom. Anything you don't want someone seeing should be done within a stall.

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.

It depends, I suppose. Others might egg the guy on to do something really stupid. Just search for Wrigley Field trough diving...

I would rather there be a way to turn off audio than have the camera come off its officer.

It's enough to have the ability to turn off audio. That's useful for restroom breaks, but also for when officers are not interacting with the public, since they should have some privacy for cooler talk (well, maybe they should, or maybe they shouldn't, but I've not thought enough about that myself).

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