LAPD considering stronger body camera policy in light of recent scandals
latimes.com
latimes.com
The footage will show you walking into a toilet, turning the camera off, turning the camera back on again only an hour and a half later, and then leaving the toilet.
I'm strongly in favor of strict requirements to use bodycams (to the point where I think if the cop/prosecutor doesn't have camera footage of the entire interaction, it should be grounds for case dismissal. But the above is some pretty conspiratorial level thinking
The current bodycam contracts must be really expensive.
1. The traffic stop must have never happened, the defendant is cleared of all charges, or
2. You are committing perjury. You go to jail.
Edit: by terrible I mean they'd be bad at not getting caught.
A jury is already allowed to make any inference they want.
> "A juror is free to infer that you are guilty when you plead the fifth"
Indeed, but they are _not_ supposed to do so only because you plead the fifth, but presumably because of other evidence. In a civil trial, AFAIK that is not the case, the jury can infer you are guilty because you did not testify in your defense.
True, but not the issue here.
> A juror is free to infer that you are guilty when you plead the fifth,
No, they aren't, which is why:
(1) If the trial judge decides before the case goes to the jury that a reasonable jury could not convict the defendant without making such a prohibited inference, the judge can dismiss the case, either in response to a defense motion or on their own, without even sending it to the jury,
(2) If the trial judge makes the same determination after the jury returns a conviction, the judge can toss the verdict and and acquit the defendant (which they could not do with a jury acquittal), and
(3) If an appeals court reaches the same decision after the trial judge has accepted the jury verdict and entered a conviction, the appeals court can reverse the conviction (which they could not do for an acquittal.)
Criminal acquittals are a constitutional special case of jury freedom in the US, as a special protection against imposition of criminal punishment by the government. The freedom juries have to ignore the law and facts and acquit because they feel like it in criminal cases is neither symmetrically reflected in a similar freedom to criminally convict, nor manifest, in either direction, in civil cases.
So the jury instructions would be pretty powerful if the judge said, "You should consider the lack of bodycam footage as beneficial to the Defendant. You may reasonably find that the accused's testimony is more credible than the officer's during those 17 minutes."
There's a lot of places in society where people ought to infer the worst if the data is hidden from them, but people continue hiding data because it works.
To give an example, I remember when FTX put out its "balance sheet", which was basically a one page spread sheet with visibly-obviously BS round numbers in it in some places. It barely qualified as a joke for a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But there was still some people... a minority, sure, but not just one or two people... arguing that, hey, maybe it was still all on the up and up and if we could just see the real info it would all be OK.
But we were entitled to conclude from such a balance sheet that FTX was a scam enterprise. It would be theoretically possible that we'd be wrong in such a conclusion; being entitled to conclude something is not the same as being guaranteed to be correct about the conclusion. However, in this case, the many who did conclude from the hiding of the data that the hidden data was about as bad as could be were have been correct.
Many people conflate being entitled to conclude something with being guaranteed to be correct. It's worth pondering the distinction if you don't immediately get what I'm saying. It is related to the question of "burden of proof"; in this example, for good and sufficient historical reasons we are entitled to assume that a company is being naughty (not just in the crypto space, in general) and they have a positive burden to prove that they are on the up-and-up. Failing to do so is not proof that they are behaving poorly. But it does mean we are entitled to assume and act as if they are behaving poorly, and it is their responsibility to prove otherwise, not ours.
No, they aren't, which is why jury verdicts (except for criminal acquittals, which are Constitutionally special as a limitation on the ability of the government to impose criminal punishment) can be overturned as a matter of law by the judge (or an appeals court) if they are not supported by non-excluded evidence in the case from which they are legally permitted to fraw the conclusions they have and from which the judge or appeals court finds a reasonable jury could make the inference.
OTOH, juries generally are able to draw negative inferences from destruction of evidence, and even in some situations from failure to preserve it by a party, and more generally from conduct of a witness bearing on their general credibility or their credibility on the specific testimony at issue.
That's how things should work, but wouldn't the idea in question mean that, just as with other zero-tolerance rules, common sense like that wouldn't be allowed anymore?
Why? You can edit it out before publication.
It seems to me that we give cops extraordinary powers and it's not unreasonable to subject them to levels of scrutiny that would ordinarily be unacceptable, to guard against the abuse of those powers. Particularly since we clearly have a problem with too many cops abusing their power.
On the other hand, going to the restroom is not likely to be a place where cops abuse their power (assuming they don't have someone in custody when they do, anyway. Cops do love their loopholes.)
The legislation to clear these situations up can be complicated and extremely difficult to get passed because of the differing interests involved.
Complicating things further, police departments can usually do any editing or redaction they want on material they release voluntarily. Policy and union collective bargaining agreements may also restrict what information can be released to specific parties like internal affairs investigators. This all means that what is redacted vs left in, for the same incident, can depend on how the video was requested and by whom. Ironically, in states with public records laws, a random member of the public will often get the most complete version, more complete than what misconduct investigators are allowed to see.
Why even allow them to turn it off for this? The footage will be automatically overwritten or deleted at one point anyways.
With great power comes great responsibility, and if you're not ready to sacrifice a bit of your privacy in order to be able to legally murder people, maybe you shouldn't be the one who gets put in that position.
Storage is cheap, cameras are cheap. People are expensive. Police misconduct is very expensive.
At this point, policy should be that all officers have three redundant cameras on and durably recording at all times. If your cameras are ever all off at the same time that’s a breach and you are immediately off duty and must face a disciplinary review.
In practice, this shouldn't be hard. Those groups are all already used to handling evidence and data with privacy considerations. If their processes are solid, it shouldn't be a big change. And if not, well, it's good that cops get a personal interest in responsible data management.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/us/seattle-police-officer-pho....
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/10/reports-seattle-p...
Shoot all the footage you like, in the best case there is too much to review, in the worst case the unions will bury it.
Problem: "We're getting wet!"
Proposal: "What we need is a roof!"
Pointless: "Take a little google about this roof that leaks..."
What point did you think you were making? Did you have some proposal for the problem that somehow does not include oversight and accountabiliy?
The example that you give is important because it shows what we have to fight against to get robust and independent police oversight boards. But the fact that it is possible to fail doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.
We give cops a legal monopoly on violence. I don't think, "show us how you're using it," is too much to ask.
I'm all for a lot more monitoring of the police. But there are points I still want surveillance to stop.
Are you funding every police force in the country getting a grief counselor? Not everyone lives in a big city, in many places you can count the entire precinct staff on one hand.
Your alternative is "bring someone in from a different city" - which means the family will likely find out by word of mouth that their loved one is dead.
Grief counselors are paid far less than cops, so tranferring work from the latter to the former would require negative funding.
It's a much more public place than home, and "let's not talk about this here, come down to the station" is likely to be... not what some folks want to hear. Easily misconstrued.
You see, I am a father, and I have been the recipient of terrible news about my child.
It was delivered by someone with the expertise to do that and the time to handle the grief and done in a very private setting.
Notably, no weapons were present. No one had extraordinary powers.
As a result, camera footage was entirely unnecessary in the first place.
It would have been much worst to have that kind of news delivered by a police officer and it’s offensive to all parties that we do that.
You say that the scenario is not plausible, and then give your own story of how it was delivered, which seems consistent, but then you end with (emphasis added):
> It would have been much worst to have that kind of news delivered by a police officer and it’s offensive to all parties that we do that.
How can it be offensive if it's not what we do? Does it or does it not happen? And if it does happen, why is GP "gross" and "missing the point entirely" when what they said is a plausible scenario. If it doesn't happen, then what do you mean by "it's offensive to all parties that we do that"?
I agree that it would be good if we stopped delivering such news via police officer.
But the reality is that we DO deliver such news via police officer. And even if we stopped in this instance, we would certainly continue delivering other bad news via police officer. News like, "Your child has been arrested and is currently in jail." So we still have the problem of how to protect the privacy of civilians that the police come in contact with.
1 - Like someone else said, don't send a cop for that job.
2 - Even taking the scenario as given, the two harms being weighed are widly imbalanced. The harm from having a personal moment made public does not REMOTELY compare to any example of police abuse.
One can concoct scenarios for anything, and it's even true that all kinds of special scenarios do happen in reality. But the numbers and the harms are not all equal.
You aren't making an argument for the maximalist position of monitor everything, all the time, with three separate cameras. Which is the position that I'm actually arguing against.
There are more than just two possible positions here. And arguing against a position that I don't hold is a straw man argument.
The power button should simply signal that something was sensitive and shouldn't be included in a records request.
Most of the commercially available on-body recorders are surprisingly bad. Axon seems to make the best, but it's a low bar. Do consider though that the environmental requirements for these devices are exceptional. Head-mounted cameras have pretty much disappeared, for example, because the cable that connected them to the recorder invariably failed after months of use. Recorders will be dropped more than once a day, and in some areas they will be wet much of the time. Difficult to make good devices that hold up for at least two years, which is usually the minimum purchasing requirement.
Second, any actions by officers without bodycam footage should invalidate qualified immunity and any officers' testimony should be largely disregarded.
Third, lack of bodycam footage should give strong negative inferences in any civil trial where the police are defendants.
The police are incredibly bad at their job, when they even do it, which isn't that often. They are vastly overpaid. They routinely lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testalying. They plant evidence. They routinely kill bystanders and then 19 of them cower in fear while one gunman is allowed to keep killing children (ie Uvalde). They steal from suspects. They abuse civil asset forfeiture for more (legalized) theft. Pretty much all they do is harass and commit violence towards minorities.
If any prosecutors dare prosecute any police for their crimes, they'll suddenly find that police witnesses in their case mysteriously start missing court appearances, tanking that prosecutor's conviction rates, which is really the only thing they care about.
Some police (eg the LA County Sheriff's Department) are essentially criminal gangs [1].
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/the-la-county-...
The hyperbole around police is getting a bit ridiculous. We need way, way more accountability for police, but being so absurdly extremist, particularly with rhetoric like that which is so easily disprovable, is not going to move us in that direction. It's just going to make proponents of police reform (like both of us and many others here) be dismissed as ridiculous crazy people.
"In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime." [1]
If police are mostly spending their time doing discretionary traffic stops, and using a criteria for those stops that ignores most white drivers, then "Pretty much all they do is harass and commit violence towards minorities" is accurate, at least in terms of time spent.
It could be simultaneously true that LA County sheriffs spend somewhere between 0.1% and 5% of their time playing a crucial role in society. It would be great to know whether this was true!
1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-prim...
Black people get force used 12-15x more often. Hispanic, 2-3x.
In historical context, this isn't particularly surprising. What's different about our modern era is the extent to which we're finally talking about it.
And they're committing ~50% of homicides and shootings while being 5% of the SF population. Stats are a funny things, they say a lot of things depending on which ones you look at
https://sfgov.org/policecommission//sites/default/files/Docu...
Now the question comes: why is this the case, and how can we address it? I don’t have evidence to support this, but I would imagine that race is an unfortunate proxy for socioeconomic status, and that, rather than race, is the main driver for these homicides. The report goes on to link drugs, gang membership, and other factors which are more significant issues in more deprived communities to these homicides, which suggest at least a reasonably circumspect approach to the problem.
Yes that's my point too, saying "police bad because they arrest black people more" while ignoring the entire context is as bad as saying "black people bad because they commit more crimes" while ignoring the context. In both cases you're looking at the rusty last link of a very long chain
We absolutely cannot use stats on suspects, who are chosen by police, to demonstrate that there is no police bias in use of force.
I was instead saying the OP is likely reasonable to infer from the data that Black men are disproportionately likely to be involved in homicides.
While it is of course possible that suspects are wrongly accused, victims’ ethnicities should be fairly clear.
Probably most cities which aren't absolute shit holes like LA, yes indeed...
There are good and bad police departments in small towns. Most of what is notable enough to show up in that history are the bad ones. That doesn't mean that all departments are bad, or even most of them. It just means that there are bad ones, and they are newsworthy.
Back when the Ferguson riots happened, I ran across a good article about this. In something like 10% of small towns, Ferguson included, police were seen as revenue generators. And, of course, the more fines that they handed out, the more money they made. For obvious political reasons the police prefer handing out questionable fines out to those with the least political power, which in Ferguson meant blacks. Which is why the local black population was ready to explode when FPD officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown.
The problems that exploded into the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement were important. The incident was historic. But when you focus on them, you miss the fact that most small towns did not do that.
They're just people.
For example, consider slavery in America before emancipation. Lots of apparently perfectly lovely people were slave owners. It wasn't a few bad apples or a sprinkling of the lower orders. It was a wide swathe of the society's best, many Founding Fathers included, whose lives were built on massive cruelty to a subset of people because they didn't see them as people. Many were surely nice to their own and to those they saw as peers.
And it's not like that sort of doublethink died out. For example, I am a nice person and I eat meat pretty regularly. I do that by ignoring the cruelty and violence performed on my dime. And when I can't ignore it, I have clever justifications for it. On the rare occasions I meet a cow I find them as charming as I do dogs and cats. Intellectually, I recognize the contradiction. And yet, I'm sure I have many more cheeseburgers ahead of me yet.
Not allowing officers to turn them off has several issues, one of which is battery life, the other one bathroom breaks and the like.
Just say that if bodycam footage is unavailable, the court assumes malice. Simple and effective.
Put cameras everywhere. I am a law and order guy, but getting a bit tired of the local PD having looser rules of engagement than patrols did in Iraq.
I remember seeing one bit of bodycam footage on the nightly news that made it look like the cop just executed a black male driver like the scene at the beginning of the Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force.
What the cop saw, and the bodycam didn't, is that the driver had a gun within reach. You might still make the case that the cop was in the wrong, but it wasn't like the cop didn't perceive a threat. In that case, the bodycam is making the cop look worse, but it could just easily be the other way around.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-body-worn-camer...
But it's a fact that cops are afraid of getting shot in a country with a lot of guns around and many of them are trained to shoot when they see a threat, certainly they are going to experience some kind of regret if they hesitate and one of their own gets shot.
We had a friend living at our house who had a psychotic break and threatened my wife with a knife. My son and I barricaded in a room upstairs and called 911. The first question they asked was "are there any guns in the house?"
My son has taken an interest in firearms, particularly black powder and flintlock weapons. I am all for it, but I make a point that there are many reasons why he should keep guns secure and out of sight when you're not using, not least that you don't want cops to see them and feel threatened.
This is the problem right here. A poorly-trained cop will be induced to panic by any number of things. Is that a reasonable excuse to empty one's clip into a human? I think not. If a cop "perceives" a greater threat from black people than white people, is it just okay for them to just act on that with lethal result? This isn't a hypothetical: the "gay panic" defense[1] is still valid in much of the US.
The funny thing here is that I think it should be illegal to drive around with a handgun within reach of the driver. Nevertheless, I believe that should be a misdemeanor (barring aggravating factors) resulting in seizure and fines. Not summary execution. Americans have the weirdest culture: their legal system reflects a preference to kill people for a non-crime, rather than pass a law which "limits freedoms."