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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this article.

The overlay with street names and parcel numbers is life saving technology. Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot, at which point the air unit can provide accurate guidance (with street names and house numbers) so they can be apprehended.

When the unit is overhead of a fixed incident like a traffic stop or an apprehension they zoom in to provide additional recorded evidence of the incident. Anyone who is a fan of police having body cams should be overjoyed at this additional level of situational observation that the air unit affords.

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I don't see anything concerning about the videos. But, I do think they should be shared with the public by default. Maybe after a short delay to allow redaction of sensitive scenes (which would in turn need to be acknowledged and explained and subject to future FOIA-style requests).

Same for body-cams worn by beat officers.

And in both cases, missing video (including purposefully obscured by car hood, etc) should be grounds for discipline.

They are shared with the public by default. The video downlinks are not encrypted and with the appropriate equipment and knowledge you can watch them in real time. In a lot of places TV stations get the direct video feed under an agreement that they delay it by a few minutes to avoid helping suspects.

In terms of body cam footage, missing video or intentional obstruction are relatively rare occurrences - but it gets heavy media play. For the most part public defenders hate body cams because they dramatically increase work load [1] and make the defense of observable charges (DUI, resisting arrest, etc) very difficult.

1. https://www.pilotonline.com/government/local/vp-nw-body-came...

Where are you getting your info that missing body camera is a rare occurrence? I've done a non-trivial amount of analysis on body camera metadata against arrest timings in Chicago and this is... just plain wrong. It's an extremely common occurrence.

And no, this sort of video isn't shared with the public by default. Maybe for some, but it's NOT common.

I was referring to the air unit footage being public by default. Sorry for the confusion.

I applaud your efforts to dig into body cam footage for police accountability. But there is probably selection bias in that you're looking around already noteworthy incidents where there might be suspicious behavior. On the whole a staggeringly massive amount of camera footage is being generated to the point that storage is becoming a budget concern for some departments: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/some-us-police-depar...

> I applaud your efforts to dig into body cam footage for police accountability. But there is probably selection bias in that you're looking around already noteworthy incidents where there might be suspicious behavior.

"Footage only goes missing if that would help the police" is not really a compelling defense of the integrity of the system, even if that happens in less than 1% of cases. "We're here for you, except when you need us" makes an awful slogan.

You're absolutely making ugly assumptions from out of nothing by thinking I was looking at notable incidents. I was not. My only criteria was about whether there was an arrest, and whether there was body camera footage around that arrest. Granted, the reporting I did on it was for the early days of the George Floyd protests, but it's a pattern that persists. Hell, there's a god damned policy that says whenever a cop moves from one unit to another, that they don't bring their BWC with them. Chicago has entire units that aren't required to have body camera despite the fact that they do arrests in areas of reported high crime, and yes, those units have shot people without even wearing any BWC.

And of course BWC usage is an expensive undertaking. But how, in any way, does that even remotely come close to speaking to its actual, complete usage or whether it gets disabled or turned on prior to an arrest? That's a silly and naive statement, and I think you know it.

Here's the work I did on BWC: https://thetriibe.com/2020/12/hundreds-of-chicago-police-mad...

  New data released by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) from the first weekend of the Black Summer 2020 uprisings shows that 64% of all arrests between May 30 and June 1 occurred without body camera footage.

I can't read the page you linked because it is terribly broken with overlays, but from what I gather you are conflating "missing footage by policy" (specific units don't have cameras allocated to them) with "missing by malice" (officers intentionally subverting the system).

There is a bit of dogmatism in your argument. If you are convinced the police are evil to begin with, that is the only conclusion you are going to draw from the data you have.

Lmao. No I'm not conflating those two. But hey, keep being lazy in your thinking and making assumptions from you know where.

Best.

Just to be clear, btw, the analysis I did was very intentionally done around cops who themselves had used BWC recently, mostly within 24. You can review the data, charts and methodologies here:

https://observablehq.com/d/9f09764dbbdfc4b5

Some of the descriptions are incomplete, but the charts address your point.

Also, you still haven't shown any information about why you believe the non-use of BWC is rare, so I'm going to assume you hold some deep biases that have prevented you from sharing those.

> For the most part public defenders hate body cams

That's too strong of an assertion. The PDs I've heard from actually like body cameras because it keeps police honest.

The problem, as that article describes, is that PDs are overworked, underpaid, and offices of the public defender are usually understaffed. Reviewing bodycam footage for every arrest has substantially increased their already heavy workload.

A lot of the footage is definitely FOIA'able, but it's not a default and they will readily deny you for arbitrary reasons. Most common is because of "undue burden", for the time it takes to review/redact.

Last time I requested/received surveillance video of a protest, it took about 3-4 months to get through FOIA and they didn't even redact it.

> Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot

High-speed car chases are definitely a thing of the past in metropolitan California, but in most cases once they break off that's the end of it. The bad guy gets away until they pop up somewhere else, hopefully not within easy reach of an escape car. The helicopter chase was always and remains a relatively exceptional case.

Why is that? Is it because of the expense of the flights themselves?

AFAIU, Because 1) strictly speaking car chases were much more frequent than one would believe based on television reporting. Most chases were short and didn't end up on the nightly news. Time, expense, and opportunity, as well as the benefits (catching some guy who, at least in theory, could be picked up later) are definite limitations. 2) How is the helicopter (10-15 minutes away or worse) supposed to find the car if they're not being followed and aren't driving conspicuously, especially at night? Relatedly, 3) the point of breaking off the chase is so the suspect stops driving dangerously themselves. Being chased by a helicopter, or even the expectation of being chased, potentially creates a similar situation the new policies are intended to avoid.

Note that the new policies are aimed at preventing chases and dangerous driving (or at least induced dangerous driving), not merely breaking away after a chase has begun. So, for example, in SF cops routinely break off the moment they believe the suspect knows they're being followed, whether or not the suspect is driving dangerously. And much to the dismay of citizens, it seems in many (most?) cases they don't even attempt to follow the car at all.

While bodycams are generally a good and necessary thing, a general pattern that's now widespread is officers selectively covering up and turning off their cameras or putting up their car hoods during stops to avoid accountability and create selective narratives. And those are things that are supposed to be directly connected to their person. A helicam has many more degrees of freedom, and much less observability.

This is easily addressed. any evidence coming from such an encounter gets tossed. Cop claims they got assaulted by someone and had their hood up or their body cam was malfunctioning or covered up? Gets thrown out and charges stemming from the stop itself are dismissed. Civilian died in that situation and there was a similar problem? All cops on the scene are mandatorily charged with manslaughter - no prosecutorial discretion is allowed and a federal prosecutor is appointed.

A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.

In theory, yes. In practice, what legal resources does the average person have to bring a case? How do their political connections compare? Oh, they died, no one saw, here’s a voucher. Have you looked at the odds of a cop getting charged with manslaughter lately?

And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.

Any death that involves a cop should be investigate by federal prosecutors. There’s a lot of deaths at the hands of cops, but not enough that you can’t investigate them.

Ultimately, if you keep this up the deaths go down and there’s less to prosecute.

Somehow other countries are able to have police that don’t regularly murder the people they’re policing and whose body cams seem to be functioning correctly. A very small portion of cops are responsible for the bulk of issues but the political culture around police and police unions keeps a horrible status quo around.

Agreed - police should be compelled to ensure the same level of diligence with their body cams as I'm sure they do to ensuring their sidearm is loaded at the start of the shift.

Throwing away the evidence doesn’t help victims of police abuse though.

I'm surprised such actions aren't treated like spoliation, in which the court assumes the worst of evidence intentionally destroyed by a party.

Police departments in the US are so corrupt that most of their abuse never gets to a court room in the first place.

How common is this pattern? I've gone about this at length in my comment history, but I think people drastically overestimate how often that happens. It's rare enough that I've never seen it after looking into dozens of use of force events by my local PD. Not saying it never happens, but usually there's a good explanation for lacking body cam footage (like the officer was off duty or undercover). It's actually somewhat reassuring that a lot of the time you'll see cops reminding each other to turn their cameras on, or freaking out if it falls off during a scuffle and they can't find it.

It’s not pearl clutching. It is an affectation put on in order to emphasize the television police drama trope of high action, high impact digital surveillance.

This is in contrast to hours upon hours of footage of almost nothing happening at all.

Was going to say, those road overlays are common if you watch chase footage. ABC7 has a cool setup.

Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this comment.

Here's the quote about the street names:

> Second, I am struck by the design of the interface itself: the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on.

Struck. Doesn't sound like a value judgement to me. The only thing the author has an explicit problem with is the level of detail the camera captures. I see two sentences in reference to this. I wonder why you thought the first sentence was necessary (I'll leave the arguments that don't actually address anything in the article alone).

Any comment on anything is automatically considered criticism. It's a useful rule to keep in mind.

Note that this is not criticism, if anything I'm agreeing and expanding on what you said.

Did you not finish the article? Later:

> I kept returning in my mind to the question of the interface itself. To how the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface somehow became a reality.

> This slip between fiction and reality seems to speak more broadly to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world. To put it another way, the footage is a product of the fantasy that the role of the police is to protect us from ubiquitous hidden danger, a fantasy generated in no small part by the police themselves.

It is I, the pearl clutcher.

> pearl clutching

Says it all

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