Police have undermined the promise of body cameras
propublica.org
propublica.org
Body camera footage should be viewed as an extension of that, and when missing or unavailable, that absence should be viewed in the same light as a failure to properly document something in a duty log --- it is a dereliction of duty and of their obligation to be accountable to the public which they ostensibly serve.
Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage, if you treat your body cams as a backup -- and only look at it when something goes wrong -- you're going to discover that your body cams weren't working all along and no one noticed.
And then you're going to look hella guilty of hiding evidence, even if it was just bad IT policies & procedures.
If you have body cameras, you need a process where you frequently, randomly pull the footage from random officers, and check whether it was turned on, recording properly, filed correctly, whether the camera quality is uselessly grainy, etc etc etc.
Otherwise, just like you don't have backups if you aren't testing your restore process, you'll find out you don't have body camera footage even when it would clear you of blame.
And that could be in conjunction with the involved party.
Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage.
Also, make it so that if a cop is accused of violating rights or involved in foul play, and their body cam "suddenly malfunctioned or were turned off or was left in the car" , a default judgement is given against the officer in question.
Make it as ubiquitous to cops as a parachute is for someone who goes skydiving. This must be enforced as harshly as possible. Cops aren't operating on their own dime.
If I'm a cop and the choice is leave my camera on or lose my job, my union membership, my retirement, my pension, and also face serious jail time, I'm leaving my camera on every time.
The watchers MUST watch the watchmen, and the watchmen must have no expectations of privacy while on duty or being paid by the public.
Destroying evidence of a crime is already a felony.
Conceal is a tricky one though as depending on placement the camera could definitely be obscured by normal day to day action (like a tussle). But again, if it can shown the action was deliberate, it’d be an action in furtherance of a crime.
The core issue is that cops are far less vulnerable to prosecution or even non-legal accountability than almost any other citizens. Largely this is due to police unions. In addition to the structural inertia, there's cultural inertia - cops don't want to hold each other accountable either.
This is why people talk about reforming police from the ground up. It's actually easier than "fixing" the current system, which actively fights against accountability.
it is very sad that we had the opportunity to do so in 2020, with both Democrat and Republican Support, but that opportunity was wasted by using that political interia and capital on the moronic "De fund the police" mantra's where by the new status quo seems to be "Well if the police act like criminals lets to all be criminals and never arrest anyone for anything"....
"Qualified Immunity" is one of the Root Causes of the policing problem, and it needs to end
You mean it's not a felony to destroy evidence?
https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-th...
Almost kind of funny it uses the Axon-provided cloud at evidence.com. Not kidding.
What this boils down to: if the camera footage has been altered or is unavailable some shady cop/department went out of their way to do so. The workflow is extremely simple: hit the record button when you interact with the public, dock the camera (needs to charge anyway) at the end of your shift. There should be no wiggle room for excuses.
The vendors have packaged all of this up decently and something like "Oops we deleted that" should never be acceptable. Even the pre-record activation rolling buffer should eliminate nearly any "We missed that because I didn't have time to activate record" scenarios other than maybe "someone ran up on me out of nowhere and started shooting/attacking me".
Oh you "forgot" to press a button when you pulled someone over? You shouldn't be a cop, plain and simple.
It’s also worth noting that recording can be activated wirelessly by various triggers. The most obvious and common one being that a nearby officer’s camera was activated (either by physically pressing the button or via a chain reaction of wireless activations).
Depending on the available hardware/accessories & configuration, other sources of activation can include unholstering a weapon, aiming or discharging a taser, by computer aided dispatch, unlocking a weapon in the vehicle, activating the light bar, high vehicle speed, running, falling, crashing, and more.
In my opinion, if multiple officers are on the scene at least one axon recording device each: there is either video evidence or willful suppression of evidence. It’s that simple.
If I was a cop I would certainly want every donut I eat to be recorded if it also means there is no change I get falsely accused of improper interaction with the public. 99.9% of the time no one will look at my donut footage.
In part because a lot of places include some questions about how you feel about the police in the standard jury screening interview, and expressing any negative opinion about police-reliability is likely to get you struck.
e.g. check out the NYC standard set of questions: https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/8-Colloquies/Voir%20Dire... -- note that 11.a is going to automatically exclude anyone who says something like "I've heard about the blue code, thanks".
-> 11. Police questions: (a) Have you had an interaction or experience with a police officer or other law enforcement person, or formed an opinion about police or our criminal justice system that would prevent you from being a fair juror? (b) Under our law, a police officer is not more, or less, believable just because he or she is a police officer. A juror must evaluate a police officer's testimony for truthfulness and accuracy in the same way the juror would evaluate the testimony of any other witness. is there any reason you cannot do so?
If a candidate expresses an opinion that would be deferential to either side, they are likely to get struck. This is a feature, not a bug.
On the other hand, bodycams run out of batteries or the electronics glitch or automated video downloads get skipped, in ways that simply don't happen with paper notebooks or data stored in central databases.
To assume that it's always a dereliction of duty is not going to be reasonable in practice.
Like, for whatever reason my cell phone doesn't automatically sync my photos to the cloud even though it's supposed to. And instead of updating my apps overnight, it starts to update them when I unplug my phone each morning. And automatic OS updates never work, I have to do them manually. Technology's great but technology sucks, too. And I have to assume bodycam software is less reliable than iOS/Android.
The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be believable for me. Maybe in low-income/low-justice countries that's an assumption one can make, but not where I live at least.
You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks.
Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure.
Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
If you search for "hardware was working fine", yes, you probably won't find much, because that's not something people complain about.
I'm talking about numerous court cases, where bodycam footage was magically unavailable, when all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to crimes committed.
I'm not after hunting all cops, or any of that horse shit.
I'm referring to accountability beyond the current 6 week paid vacation, qualified immunity slapped on pretty much everything, being able to simply quit a job after committing literal crimes and get a job in an adjacent city doing the same thing, and stupid -isms, like "Yeah, that guy died not because we choked him until he couldn't breathe, but because of "excited delirium".
> Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
If you're trying to be fair by including the former sentence, then that should also include a "many, many" before "exceptions" unless you have the data I was asking after. As it stands, this adds no further information
> You can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing while an officer was violating someone's rights.
If you think the cops are so bad, what about the criminals? I'd also claim the cop was violating my rights if I did something wrong and it's my word against theirs. How are you ever going to know what happened there? You can assume the cop was corrupt and the citizen innocent in all those cases, but if it were knowable then the citizen would have brought it to court rather than to the media, so I'm assuming it's unknowable who was right in most of those cases
There has to be a fraction of cases where their rights were not being violated as claimed and footage is still unavailable. Whether that is 1/10 or 9/10, neither of us apparently has the information to make such a claim, but you're making extraordinary assumptions without extraordinary evidence
if only there was a recording device to record what actually happened....
>>You can assume the cop was corrupt and the citizen innocent in all those cases,
yes that is exactly how it should work, that is how the system is setup to work. We have some how flipped that in recent years. At all times you should assume the government is abusing you, unless they can prove they are not.
No video, I side with the people not the government
>>There has to be a fraction of cases where their rights were not being violated as claimed and footage is still unavailable. Whether that is 1/10 or 9/10
It would be an error rate far far far far far less than that, and when you factor in most calls have more than one officers, plus patrol cars that have their own recording devices, plus citizen witnesses, plus business surveillance I think we get to such an unlikely circumstance to be statically impossible
The difference between cops and criminals is criminals aren't public servants, granted powers beyond the norm, so they can do their jobs. That being a literal fact, yes.. they are held to a higher standard or should be. You're arguing a false equivalence.
As far as knowing "what happened there", that's literally the point of bodycams.
There is a fraction of the cases where someone's rights weren't violated. A fraction, a lesser amount, a smaller subset, a number lower in value, etc. etc.
And you apparently didn't even try to look at the web, so...ok!
The criminals don't have the power of the state behind them. We're supposed to hold police to a higher standard than criminals.
> but if it were knowable then the citizen would have brought it to court rather than to the media,
Why would you think that? Do you think that courts and lawyers are free? Most people in the US have to work to survive and live paycheck to paycheck. Missed work means they can lose their homes. Even if someone had the time and the money to fight against the police in court the courts are heavily biased in favor of the police and they would have to live in fear of retaliation for the rest of their lives.
Even when police are caught on camera clearly committing crimes there is no guarantee that anything will be done about it. Evidence doesn't always mean much when the police can investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong.
If police are supposed to have body cam footage and don't, they shouldn't be believed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're mixing up two mechanisms of law here:
In criminal law, the police investigates and the public prosecutor brings the case to court. The police often has a discretion to not bring a case if they don't want to, or to indeed frame a case in their favor if they aren't granted that liberty by the lawmaker
In civil law, you can sue for damages (such as lost time off work) or for other things that are made illegal (such as an organisation not following warranty legislation). The police is not involved here and bringing such a case is at your discretion
The latter system is what I had in mind when I said you could bring the evidence to court. Though it might also apply in the former case, in a situation where evidence is inadmissible if obtained illegally (this is not always the case)
> Even as the proliferation of police body cameras and bystander cellphone video has turned a national spotlight on extreme police tactics, qualified immunity, under the careful stewardship of the Supreme Court, is making it easier for officers to kill or injure civilians with impunity. The Supreme Court’s role is evident in how the federal appeals courts, which take their cue from the high court, treat qualified immunity. In an unprecedented analysis of appellate court records, Reuters found that since 2005, the courts have shown an increasing tendency to grant immunity in excessive force cases – rulings that the district courts below them must follow. The trend has accelerated in recent years. (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...)
I'd argue that it's waaaay easier to make stable bodycam software than a stable mobile phone OS.
If they're like most other device companies, they're hiring the cheapest programmers they can find to write something quick and dirty, and not doing anything close to the level of review and testing that Apple/Google do.
Systems are going to fail, but they need to fail safely. If a bodycam is low on battery or not acting properly, there needs to be some notification for both the operator and department to know that the bodycam failed or is about to fail, and their procedure has to handle such cases. So for example have an indicator light that comes on at 20% battery power and officers need to return to the station and swap cameras when that light comes on, and battery levels at the end of a shift are logged automatically with a notification if any are returned below 10%.
Of course genuine failures are going to happen from time to time. If an officer falls and damages their camera in the middle of a shootout, they're not going to call a timeout so they can fix it. But such instances should be rare, documented, and reviewed. The department should at any given time be able to produce a list of what footage they are missing and why they're missing it, and such reports should be audited by third parties. During the review, evidence should be collected - pictures of any damage, software logs, statements, etc. as well as actions taken during that missing time, which should be reviewed with increased scrutiny. So long as the discrepancy is properly documented, it's fine, though procedures should be updated to prevent a repeat of this particular failure mode.
Basically if a critical piece of footage is lost it should be easy to show that this was an isolated incident and that it won't happen again. If they can't, then there is a fundamental problem at the top level of management. This is all standard practice in other high stakes fields like pharmaceutical production.
Uh, no?
I'd naive assume it would be much simpler and more reliable, and that failure to do something like recharge or upload data would log an exception somewhere that would get immediate attention. When the 'IT guy' goes to work the next morning they should see that one of the bodycams didn't do its thing the night before and that bodycam should get replaced. The maximum window of failiure should be 24h or less, and multiple failures happening to all responding officers shouldn't really be possible since they should have a MTBF exceeding a year.
They deal with people very single day, they need to be able to turn those cameras off in the case of, a nude minor, a detailing of psychiatric history of a minor, etc.
The problem is that giving them that ability also opens the door for them to abuse it. There is no easy/good answer here.
And I'm not making excuses for them, if they're abusing it go scorched earth on them please, their position in society means they require it.
But police MUST be able to turn their cameras off.
The footage should of course be archived for some long period of time measured in years for use in proceedings, and audits the discover significant periods of no footage not attributable to technical malfunction should be grounds for immediate dismissal of the officer.
Making allowances for the officer to decide when it's "appropriate" to turn off the camera will inevitably lead to the current situation of the cameras being not used nearly enough - only instead of "oops it was off" it will become "I used my judgement that this was a sensitive event and turned it off, whoops now no one knows who shot first"
This all works in theory but not practice. If we were try to implement that in 20 years people would be complaining about fraud tracked down to some minimum wage worker reviewing tapes for these 3rd parties.
this is why I said there's not an easy answer.
?? This already can happen by default for a LOT of people. I work as a subcontractor for a federal contractor in healthcare, and I can see all of them if I wanted to. We just don't.
I also work in healthcare, I'd like to see you make that request.
edit: To draw an analogy. you may work for a credit bureau but if you start requesting records for celebrities you're not going to be working there for very long.
I've _built_ the systems put in place to limit and monitor for these sorts of activities in healthcare specifically as a result of the liability it puts the company under due to federal regulation.
I'm not saying that encapsulates everything that person says. But "reasonable safeguards" absolutely include a lot of the things you say are unacceptable.
I worked for a company that built claims benefits management systems, including one for SAG-AFTRA. Notably, that one, because they were about the only customer who was absolutely militant about lockdown of access to data (because it would show celebrity healthcare claims).
Actually, the biggest challenge we had was from our customers wanting to do data mining that was federally illegal (like looking at familial healthcare data to determine predisposition for a covered person for a certain condition).
There's no way they fall under one of those exemptions, especially if they don't need it to do their job. If anything, the statement "we just don't" is indicative that they wouldn't fall under those exemptions.
But really the point was that this stuff is heavily regulated. If a company isn't following those regulations that's going to bite them in the ass eventually.
Typically speaking, you can convince auditors of a lot of things but it only takes getting the wrong auditor for it to all go down hill.
Cute of you to think that there's a 'request' part. My point was that we do need to check them to see if x site/app/tab is working or not after patching. It's part of our job.
Edit: I think the confusion here might be you're thinking US Federal. I am not.
For example, if you can get code into production you cannot have access to production data and vice-versa.
You'll also see data in different databases where no one has access to both. You'll also see things like this with the use of encryption keys, such as KEK vs DEK where no system has access to both.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/93886/dek-kek-a....
typically speaking these compliance frameworks will have exemptions for "business need" and companies will try to drive a semi-truck through that hole. Whether they get away with it depends on multiple factors such as the size of the company and the auditor's mood.
It's almost like being "too big to fail". I have seen some absolutely heinous setups surrounding compliance related data that was allowed via "business need" because pulling that rug would cause the entire company to stop functioning. Generally when companies do things like this and they get to that size they'll spend years rectifying the problem because auditors will start giving them the stink-eye or they'll actually hire people who aren't comfortable with what they're doing.
it's all very messy, but don't assume that just because you have that kind of access that you should (and don't assume the reverse either). Without knowing more about what you do I couldn't say.
But for sure the other poster went quiet when I asked who the company was because they're fully aware they're on shaky ground. Which was my point in making that statement.
No. It had nothing to do with 'shaky grounds.' I do what my job requires me to do.
I didn't respond because I didn't want you to potentially doxx me. Why would I reveal the company name where I work?
That being said, post your passport details here. If you don't, you're obviously a criminal on shaky grounds with the law. If you weren't, you obviously would have no problems doing so.
See how that works?
That is the truth regardless of your claims about why you won't reveal the company name.
Absurd arguments all around.
Heck, I worked at a landline phone company 25 years ago and they used the last 4 numbers of a social security number to verify everyone. Think about this every time you talk to a utility: That underpaid worker definitely sees your information. Plus addresses and names and so on.
But more realistically, there is no real reason that the person viewing the footage needs any of that information. It might be helpful to know that the person is having a mental health crisis, sure, and it might be helpful to know if the person is a minor. But they don't need to know the names of folks nor what the diagnosis is. Treat it like health information: Give nothing but the necessary information. And if society can trust an underpaid, stressed call center employee to have a bunch of this information, I'm pretty sure we can trust these underpaid, stressed folks too.
For example, people have been blackmailed over psychiatric records from their childhood.
The risk would remain about the same. Most folks aren't gonna do this, and those that want to already can.
And we could lessen it by being more accepting and forgiving and not making things like mental health struggles a source of shame.
because many of them put patient records in physical safes. Do you know why they don't put them online?
yeah, exactly.
What you've basically said is "it's ok because someone could break into a police station to get that material anyway!".
Or to apply this in another way.
I should be ok with other men sleeping with my wife because she might get raped anyway.
it's such a ridiculous line of thought. The fact that someone somewhere is willing to enter into criminality to do it doesn't imply we shouldn't endeavor to prevent it.
Not sure why you're calling out children specifically: they can't give consent but, if asked, I expect that adults would rarely give consent for being filmed by the police either, even when dressed as well as one can be!
Perhaps that's not common knowledge? It's not illegal to have pictures of nude children insofar as I know laws in various countries. What's illegal presumably everywhere is if there are sexual suggestions (or more than suggestions), which presumably would not be the case in your example
Also, police has to handle these sorts of pictures for prosecution anyway. They already have certain exemptions. Even if you had been right, that could have been extended to cover these cameras while on duty
have at your claims good sir.
But there should be little to no discretion.
There are security cameras in hospital ERs (I'm a paramedic) where I absolutely assure you even outside rooms, in the open areas, people in states of undress (from MVA/trauma, etc., and us working on them) and people in behavioral crisis are a daily occurrence. Those cameras are not turned off then.
Why? It's not a mobile phone, they can't "save the video to the cloud" - it gets downloaded when they return to the station, by the charger.
However, in 35 states, and this blows my mind, an officer can have "consensual" sex with a detainee. Even if they are in handcuffs at the time. 35 states have decided that this is not improper from an "authority" perspective (leaving aside for now the whole "having sex while on duty").
There was a recent case where a minor who was in custody and handcuffed had sex with two officers in their patrol vehicle. The officers claimed it was consensual and the courts agreed. I do not believe they even faced disciplinary action.
> Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.
Because police and police departments and police unions know that even post-BLM, they will face little, usually zero, consequences for doing so, or for wasting taxpayer dollars fighting to defend their refusal.
Hell, it only became criminal for federal police 18 months ago!
Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-c...
Realize that being charged means that at some point, the person in custody objected enough that charges were filed by the DA/prosecutor.
Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-c...
It's notable the officers in question were dismissed.
I do think it's a good idea to pass a law that sex with an officer while in custody cannot be consensual.
That's pretty nutty. I don't know the backstory, but even if it's "consensual" it's still statutory rape to have sex with a minor.
> I do not believe they even faced disciplinary action.
Not even that administrative process? How come the courts had anything to say about it, then? ...I guess that must have been the minor's court appearance, not the cops. Under the circumstances, I guess that minor might have been disinclined to give defence evidence that the arresting cops had raped her.
I believe she was a minor but above the age of consent in that state.
And yeah, there's the whole question of "why are cops having sex while on duty?" - that's inappropriate even if it's your spouse, let alone someone you're interacting with in an official capacity, let alone someone who is in custody and detained, let alone someone who is handcuffed at the time.
There are so many separate levels of "what the actual f" here.
This said, if we want people to sign up for the role, there needs to be some protection and privacy in place for them. They are also people, with families and in some cases organized and dedicated opposition.
In pursuit of these goals, zero expectation of privacy seems like an unrealistically high bar.
It's your view that deliberately concealing evidence is no worse than not handling the administrivia of an arrest correctly?
As I recall, Miranda was introduced specifically to force police departments to tell arrestees their rights, which the law already required them to do. Miranda made it possible for courts to dismiss charges, if the suspect had been questioned without being told his rights. Trying to compel the police to obey the law just because it was the law simply failed. Th only way it could be enforced was to get several prominent prosecutions (of guilty people!) dismissed.
I think it's incredibly naive to portray this as a "defaulting" or "failing to grapple with a fundamental question".
I am 100% certain "who controls the footage" was the first question out of the police brass' mouths, and the crucial point in negotiations, where conceding to let the police themselves control the footage allowed the use of bodycams in the first place.
Nothing was left to chance here, this is entirely deliberate.
And if the police union is threatening to strike, then who cares. Those cops are not the ones we want anyway. Rehire.
Because if you don't, you get election ads with scary looking footage and a voice-over that says something like:
"Mayor/Governor/whatever Smith's anti-police crusade is putting you and your family in danger. This November, send a message by voting out the pro-crime politicians."
You could argue that politicians should make a principled stand against this and do the right thing anyway, and you're right in a moral sense. But there's good odds that those guys will get replaced with people who are more willing to give the police what they want.
Like the ability to actually do something when a looter horde raids a department store?
The fact that you chose an unrelated topic couched in deliberately inflammatory language only shows bad faith on your part.
And pot is legal in Oregon, so why would the smell be probable cause? Besides, cops invent PC on a routine basis.
You’re being dense on purpose. You know I’m right but don’t want to admit it. You go for cheap shots on my language because you have no other legit arguments. Pathetic.
Something like that might happen once or twice every few decades. In the country.
Meanwhile, the abuses the police are perpetrating, in many cities, are happening on a monthly basis (or more often).
Even if we stipulate that we need someone capable of dealing with the looter horde, we don't need that capability to be in the same hands as the people who are handing out traffic tickets every day.
https://corporate.target.com/press/statement/2023/09/target-...
In other words the press release is just dodging responsibility.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-retail-l...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/business/target-retail-theft-...
"Target is closing nine stores in major cities across four states, claiming theft and organized retail crime have made the environment unsafe for staff and customers – and unsustainable for business."
Yet the NYT article says:
"Target’s chief financial officer, Michael Fiddelke, said shrinkage had reduced the company’s profit margin by more than $400 million in 2022,"
as justification for closing stores. Yet their data was BS as shown in the NYT article.
If the "wrong way" means beating them while handcuffed or choking them to death then I don't see what the problem is. Any police officer who is too scared to do their job because they don't think they can even stop a shoplifter without violating that person's rights isn't cut out to be a cop and shouldn't have the job in the first place.
Portland PD is paying far above average and is funded to hire hundreds of cops, but no one applies because the cops know they’re muzzled in Portland and they know that the local people abd laws don’t support a “thin blue line”
The remaining cops who stayed on have “quiet quit” and they use that as a tactic to get the people to give them more power. It’s a terrible situation. The cops know they can hold the people hostage and they aggressively do that.
In my locale those folks are elected or appointed, so if you cant trust them, yea, you've got a problem.
Yes, we have a very big problem on our hands. The system itself is deeply corrupted by perverse incentives and by a very large number of people with strong leanings toward authoritarianism and fascism.
At the same time, talking to my neighbors (I have about five officers that live on my block), they like the cameras because most of the time they either prove the case, or show that there really was no abuse (yes, the arrestee did punch the cop).
I think where the issues is when something happens that creates a liability. An officer violates the law, or someone's rights while making an arrest. It creates a situation where the incentive is to railroad the accused at all costs so the accused cannot file or have little chance to win a federal civil rights lawsuit. In these cases it's amazing how difficult to get that video can be.
This behavior also discourages any thoughtful people with integrity from applying, and beats it out of them quickly when they do. The streets would be a lot safer with more citizens performing a genuine public safety role with fewer weapons and chips on their shoulders, but the police lobby essentially holds cities hostage by monopolizing the public safety role and strategically withdrawing from that role in protest whenever an insufficiently deferential policy is passed.
* in a few select countries around the world. This is a rather narrow view of police(wo)men as a blanket statement.
They are sometimes sentenced in the court of public opinion though, as with Osmo Vallo [1].
Unfortunately, I don't even think improved state oversight will help until the underlying issue of qualified immunity is addressed. The current legal framework in the US literally rewards police officers for being ignorant of the law.
> is a legal inference, adverse to the concerned party, drawn from silence or absence of requested evidence. [...] According to Lawvibe, "the 'adverse inference' can be quite damning at trial. Essentially, when plaintiffs try to present evidence on a point essential to their case and can't because the document has been destroyed (by the defendant), the jury can infer that the evidence would have been adverse
The first paragraph sounds a lot like "assume the worst in people" (must be a nice way to go through life); the second paragraph specifies it only in the case of intentionally destroyed evidence (that seems reasonable when you can know it was intentional). Interesting concept
If the police is refusing to release a video to prove their stance, there is absolutely no need to give the police the benefit of the doubt.
The problem is that due to the underlying need for police cooperation in unrelated cases, no sane DA or judge would dare challenge a cop (or the police union) who can claim "oh it was a malfunction" or "oh uh the battery ran out" when it comes time for video footage to be reviewed and made public in the case of a police officer breaking the law.
My proposal: make it someone's (or an anonymous board of lawyers') job to review any and all police video footage. The police union is not allowed in any circumstances to know who is doing that job, nor are they allowed to protest. Make it federal law that every officer when on duty has no expectations of privacy, and their body cam must be on 100% of the time when on duty, no exceptions.
If you are going to work (and retire) on the public's dime, using equipment the public paid for, you must without question bow to public demands of complete transparency and full accountability. I don't give a damn what the union thinks, they are on our dime.
How many Attorneys General worked as public defenders? I bet out of the current 50 US AGs, it's probably close to zero.
More training is more pay and benefits, and they have to keep it current by reapplying and showing they've done recent training, like teachers.
You have to memorize and demonstrate understanding of law, pass an obstacle course, meet marksmanship standards, pass a driving test under extreme conditions, and more. It's no joke. And they have to recertify on a lot of this yearly.
Nobody's perfect. None of their critics can actually do that job. Most couldn't clear the first fence in the obstacle course. You'd hate being subject to the same surveillance at work as well.
I don't want my comment to be taken as anti-cop because I'm not, but an office worker being monitored all day and a cop on duty being monitored aren't really equivalent at all. Shit, if lives depended on me & my actions and I worked in a field where big, heavy decisions could fall on me at any point, I sure as shit hope there's someone or something there to document it all.
And surveillance? Give me a break. At my job, all my keystrokes are logged. Every website I go to is logged. My email and chat are archived and searched for keywords and AI. And I'm not tasked with "Protect and Serve." I work for an insurance company. Cops have life and death power, so as Spidey tells us, with power comes responsibility. Don't like it? Don't pick up the badge...
You should look at the educational and training requirements used by European police forces. They make the "police academy" look like the joke that it is. Or look at how the military trains MPs. MPs have a much better understanding and usage of force than the majority of police forces in the US.
LOL, what? Police unions have consistently fought against recertification requirements, particularly the CPAT that police and fire use (candidate physical ability test).
"Demonstrate understanding of law" - police have claimed, and courts have consistently upheld that police do not need to know the law. They repeatedly arrest photographers in public places, and it ends up in appeal after appeal while they defend their abuse of 1A, and even after all that Chiefs will still stand on court steps saying "We can't expect our officers to be constitutional lawyers".
American police training is some of the lowest standard in the developed world. It takes more time to be certified as a hairdresser in most states.
> None of their critics can actually do that job.
Get out of here with that attitude. That's right up there with "If you're not behind our military, feel free to stand in front of them" bullshit designed to shut down any criticism, valid or otherwise.
>You have to memorize and demonstrate understanding of law
No shit...that's the entire premise of the job. Someone whose job it is to enforce the law needs to actually know the law.
>pass an obstacle course
You should see some of the cops in the cities I've lived in (Bay Area, NYC, PHX, Miami). Some are/were quite fit, but a bunch couldn't pass an obstacle course even if the only obstacle was "touch your toes" or "run a mile in under 15 minutes".
>meet marksmanship standards
You don't say? Someone whose job description includes "the ability to use lethal force when necessary" needs to know how to properly use a lethal firearm?
>pass a driving test under extreme conditions
Weaving in and out of traffic with lights blaring is NOT hard. People are required to get out of your way. You also have a great car with tons of upgrades, all paid for by the taxpayer.
>And they have to recertify on a lot of this yearly.
Good. Plenty of professionals in other fields have to do this too, and they don't get backed by a taxpayer funded union.
Seen plenty of obese cops too. No idea how they stay on the force.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think that'd be possible at the federal level. Politics aside, local policing is controlled by states and federal control over those issues is largely limited to things like withholding funding for states that don't comply with federal program requirements.
We need to either change the culture—and adversarial third-party oversight is a forcible way to do that—or remove the tools the police use to abuse the public.
If police fail to produce the footage, judges should instruct jurors that the adverse inference may be drawn (in case they're insufficiently skeptical to do so themselves).
If that weren't enough to know how useless they'd be, we'd had dash cams for t least 20 years at that point (since Rodney King? I can't remember honestly, but mid-1990s anyway). Nothing improved. No less abuse, no better outcomes. We had already run the experiment, but collectively decided that the results were wrong.
So, why did we bother to camera up all the cops? Because intelligence agencies wanted millions of cameras out there the feeds from which they could watch. They wanted mobile cameras, not fixed. And we're still 20 or 30 years too early for the robot revolution. It had to be meat drones.
But at the same time, it does a poor job of arguing that the two recorded shootings it spends most of its word-length on (Richards and Trawick) were actually wholly unjustified. The author probably should have chosen some different, more egregious cases to make their point.
All three of these cases described are disgusting instances of police overreach and failure.
What I will say is that I do believe all the incidents described in the article were tragedies, and sadly preventable. And I do believe there were breaches of protocol by officers at the scene in all of the cases.
But I just plain don't believe that the turning point moment for Richards and Trawick was the officers' decision to use force. If a mentally ill person has reached the point of charging at police officers holding a knife (and/or whatever Richards was doing with his knife and fake gun), they were already failed, woefully, by society and by their support network.
1) Wow, this job is TERRIBLE. People doing stuff like committing a crime on video, going on a high speed chase, crashing into multiple cars and injuring people, finally crashing the car into a tree, shooting at the police, running on foot, hiding behind a building, and then fighting to the point it takes four-five cops to subdue them but then constantly screaming stuff like "I didn't do anything! Why are you hassling me? You better hope I don't find out where you live because I'm going to [insert the most disgusting, profane, and explicit sex crime stuff you can't even think of] to your wife and daughter". All while claiming they're having an asthma attack even though they just sprinted 1/4 mile. Then it takes the same number of cops 10 minutes just to get them in the police car because they're still fighting, spitting, kicking, who knows what.
The really bizarre ones are once they get in the car their primary concern is where their phone ended up... They end up at the jail with a "spit hood" over their head and their entire body strapped to a special wheeled chair where they can't move at all because they're still that dangerous. Most of us here cannot imagine it. It's the wildest stuff you've ever seen - hence the millions of subscribers.
2) Wow, this cop is TERRIBLE. Obvious racial profiling, screaming at people for doing nothing or committing minor infractions, beating/killing people for no reason, inventing charges, etc, etc.
People are people and it's a cross-section: terrible people doing terrible things on either side of the law. Obviously the police should be held to a higher standard but more often than not my take away is "I don't know how cops do this job without turning into completely cynical, jaded, paranoid, and aggressive maniacs". I've been on about 24 hours total of ride alongs in some "rough" areas and hit my lifetime quota. It's that disturbing, terrifying, and high-stress. After each "shift" it would take me a while just to start to reconcile what I experienced.
I think anyone would have a tough time dealing with someone who (for example) tries to kill you, threatens your family, spits on you, etc while still treating them decently and humanely. In many areas this is over and over, day after day.
In the US especially police are basically the "catch all" for all of the other (ample) problems in our society. The people on both sides are often in impossible, no-win situations.
When I was on a ride along and I watched a guy who just brutally beat his pregnant girlfriend (who was bleeding on the ground in the front yard) charge at us and end up rolling around on the ground with the cop just what they "wanted me to see"? Turns out he was "going hard" because he had a warrant for armed robbery.
Same goes for the time the cop pulled over a bunch of gang members (Latin Kings) who threatened to kill us and started making threatening movements in the car (we backed up and he called in some kind of "tactical team" that blocked the street and ordered them out one by one).
Or when I watched a guy shove an EMT out of his front door, run in the kitchen, grab a knife, and swipe it at the cop because he beat his partner unconscious who was bleeding from the head on the kitchen floor? I was personally and directly in multiple situations where I witnessed these things and was terrified and probably a little traumatized as a result.
There's more but I'm not kidding when I say this stuff was traumatic. This was 10 years ago and it's still fairly difficult for me to talk about but I do occasionally because of viewpoints and responses like yours.
This is not "what they wanted me to see". Ride along programs exist to give ordinary citizens a view into a "day in the life". Of course when on a ride along they will be on their best behavior but for what it's worth the officer I was with was an acquaintance of mine so he didn't hold back doing horrible things like "Oh that girl looks hot, she has a taillight out. I want to introduce myself". He pulled her over, talked her out of the car to "look at the light", and spent a while flirting with her. Seriously, that happened too. Disturbing.
In the two domestic violence situations I described I was a little uncomfortable at the level of force he used to respond to them, which is so confusing and conflicting because moments before that I thought I was going to get killed or seriously injured. It really messes with you. Was it "reasonable" to order those gang guys out of the car, make them lie face down on the ground, handcuff them, call in gang unit detectives to line them up, take pictures of them, and question them handcuffed while sitting on the curb? To this day I have no idea.
I have seen the studies. In terms of death, serious injury, etc law enforcement doesn't even crack the top 10 most dangerous professions. However, in my experience I was in very real fear for my life at least once each time I went out. I either ran away or stood there paralyzed thinking "If this guy wins this fight I'm dead". It's not a good sign when you finally realize "They think I'm a cop. Problem is I have no weapons, no protection, and no training. This is even more dangerous for me." At one point the cop did something like "I'm not supposed to show you this but if things get really bad here's how you unlock the rifle in the car".
I would hope that people can recognize what it does to you psychologically to see this side of humanity every day. It's a lot different than being a logger and worrying about a tree falling on you, or being an electric lineman and worrying about slipping and getting electrocuted. Falling off a cell tower, whatever.
It's very eye opening, scary, disturbing, and confusing all around. I watch the Youtube body cam footage with either slant and think "Yeah, that's what it's like - good, bad, and ugly".
I did a ride along in the 80s and was paired with a deputy who worked a tough area. They wanted to show me the worst of the worst, so that in case I decided to pursue a career in LEO I would know what it could entail. My deputy only responded to what he felt were serious, exciting calls. Scared the crap out of me. But he was honest enough to say that most of his days weren't like the stuff I saw in my week. This wasn't a one day thing, but kind of a pre-screening thing for a LEO career. I'm not sure that an "ordinary citizen" can do this just to see what it's like anymore due to liability on the part of most police departments.
I too saw my deputy use force that I felt was uncalled for. And demeaning behavior towards people who were just hoping someone could help. He also did crap like speed whenever he felt like it, broke a million traffic laws when it wasn't necessary, and behaved like a stereotypical bad cop. Imagine how Hank Shrader acted in Breaking Bad. Everyone was assumed to be a scumbag and guilty of something.
I have family and friend in LE, and my neighbor has been a captain in our city since I moved here. And I have a coworker who used to be a CO at the state pen. Dealing with the inmates, etc can be corrosive. You see people at their worst.
But that's what they're paid to do. The system needs to address this as best as possible so that LEO (and COs) can cope with the stress and don't develop an "us vs them" attitude. My CO coworker talked about how a lot of the COs just loved to mix it up with inmates. And my LEO friends talk about how these jobs naturally attract people with either too much adrenaline/testosterone or an inability to control themselves under stress. But if you're LEO, you sure can't easily get psychotherapy.
I appreciate you telling your story, and reading my with a charitable mindset.
You came away with a nuanced and complicated view on policework, which is probably close to reality. Is that really the story these YouTube body-cam compilations tell?
The problem with YT Channels is of course they're there to optimize views for their revenue. From what I can see that's why they tend to target two audiences in terms of their content:
1) Pro law enforcement - show the worst of "criminals" and the best of police.
2) Anti law enforcement - show the worst of police.
Sadly there is plenty of content available for either and a viewer needs to make sure their content consumption diet includes both for a realistic view. Of course the YT algorithm is an element in this as well - if you want more of either it's more than happy to serve that up for you to further entrench your preconceived notions.
It's not a job you'd want your children to do, but it's one that someone has to do.
3rd party can deal with warrents directly and office should be punished for turning off cameras.
This 3rd party however may not be connected or funded in anyway to cause a conflict of interest. No funding by the police!
So you're actually going to start sufficiently funding my Quality Assurance department instead of treating it like a cost center, right? Right?!
I won't hold my breath on that one.
Just like "this call may be monitored for blah blah", your actions as a cop should be monitored by the public.
Maybe we should have local citizens watching/reviewing body cam footage 24/7 to make sure cops are doing their job correctly. It's also job creation.
Edit: obviously there are some confidentiality issues, so only certain folks should have that clearance. But it feels like we need a better oversight system, whatever that may be.
That's like requiring screensharing + camera on for remote workers 100% of the time. It sucks.
Policing is hard enough job as it is. Make it even harsher by 24/7 monitoring and even fewer people will show up. Then you'll have to scrap the bottom of the barrel to find any officers. Which is not exactly good for the society.
Looking from afar, US policing issues surrounding gun use is just a reflection of the overall society. US as a whole is overall much more aggressive society. Both police and criminals are more aggressive.
I'm glad to live in a country where the police, for sure not perfect, are not an enemy of the people / above-the-law racket which can do as it pleases. And I believe they don't wear body cams.
If one isn't trained as (or thinking as) a scientist, then I think it's easy to miss the importance of documenting expected results. One shouldn't believe a conclusion, even an expected and obvious conclusion, without data supporting it. This makes gathering data to support expected results a valuable process, and one that should be recognized.
(For example, in this particular context, if one wants to argue against police claims that body-cams offer sufficient accountability, being able to argue from specific cases where the accountability has been subverted is much more likely to be useful than arguing from a general feeling that they won't be used properly.)
Reaction: When possible, leave "science" out of any broad-based public policy discussion. Between the people with negative reactions to the word, and those who tune out "because science is hard stuff", and those who start judging the arguments by "how fancy is his lab coat?" criteria - it's seriously counter-productive.
> ...if one wants to argue against police claims that body-cams offer sufficient...argue from specific cases where...
YES, that is the right approach. Go directly there. And pick your specific cases very carefully, to make it extra-clear to your audience that naive quick fixes - which all-too-many of them really want to believe in - are nothing but different brands of square tires.
That would only matter if it was a matter of "better argument" setting the issue.
Whereas it's a matter of power balance: those in power want the police on their side, and the police wants less oversight.
Though the parent does not "argue against police claims that body-cams offer sufficient accountability".
I think they're rather pointing that the accountability they offer in "optimal use", don't matter if police chiefs don't care how they're used/bypassed/workaround-ed/and so on, and this is allowed to have minimal impact on the officers and them.
"Motorola Solutions Raises Spending on Body Cameras to Grab Market Share The equipment maker expects revenue in its video-security business to jump more than 20% this year after a 30.7% leap last year"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/motorola-solutions-raises-spend...
The makers of the TASER, Axon, gave away body cams to sell the services supporting them.
It worked well and was very expensive to try to enter the market against their brand loyalty and existing market penetration.
1. No camera, no insurance
2. A national registry for individual officer history
Having exclusive use of legal force needs some kind of counter balance. Not sure what else could do it.
Ideally yes, but when every cop in the city refuses to do their job at the same time the city doesnt really have a choice. Firing every police officer is not an option for politicians who want to be re-elected.
How about the simple fact, that if you delete data that would be used in a court case, the court will automatically assume the worst case, while cops can do it, and the penalty? Nothing!
Internet/bandwidth creating cost free video channels for politicians to advertise themselves is not transparency.
What transparency in Congress? Congress lacks even the transparency requirements many state legislatures have and is essentially completely opaque, with virtually everything substantive happening out of the public eye. The absence of compromise has to do with certain factions preferring to scheme for achieving total government control and preferring to making things worse in the short term if it can be leveraged to help advance that cause, not to transparency.
Here's a better idea – elect people who can be trusted.
We need effective rules of ethics (with teeth) and oversight procedures. I don't think that forcing every politician to wear a camera 24/7 is really the best solution, but it's hopelessly naïve to think that some of them aren't literally going to bed with the people who are trying to get favorable legislation passed.
A society like the US is just too diverse—not so much in heritage, but in cultural values (or at least subcultural values) to be able to "just elect people who can be trusted."
Let's go fully remote, sell off most federal property in DC, and retrocede Washington back to Maryland (like Alexandria County back in 1846), dissolving DC and draining the swamp for good.
Then we can take proposals for creating a District of Lincoln or Roosevelt for meetings and events closer to the center of population, e.g. Kansas City (near mean center) or the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio (near median center).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/zoom-congr...
While "virtual," American colonists had better representation in the British Parliament on paper than we do today.
We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries:
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...
We need to repeal the Apportionment Act of 1929 and expand the House to an appropriate size.
Yes.
>Because hey, they could be doing business while taking a shit?
Sucks to be them. If they're shy about it, they could always not get elected.
Though, joking aside, you don't have to bring in the "slippery slope" argument. As long as they don't talk to anyone while taking a shit, they could be allowed to close the camera.
It's enough that they have to have it open whenever they make any political discussion and anything that relates to their position and role.
Not when they shit or order a latte. And if they do have such a discussion while ordering a latte, and not have it recorded, then it should be grounds for them being ejected.
>Here's a better idea – elect people who can be trusted.
And how's that been working out?
Everyone should be a glasshole
Until it is a felony to not upload all video within 1 hour of the end of the cops shift and make it publicly available on the web with geotagging left in place,
I live under a tyranny.
The real effect of knowing what cops do all day would be half as many cops, or fewer.
> Cops are not warriors in danger of a guerrilla attack.
I think some of them need to hear that.
Let's just agree to disagree
Suggestion: When an altercation occurs, everyone with a recording of it should upload it to a public web site where all video is permanently available to the public. Anyone not uploading their video is assumed by the courts to be at fault for the altercation.
Another suggestion: All recordings in public places must be geotagged and uploaded to a public web site within 24 hours where they become part of the public record. This can be implemented with the creation of a government website and software updates to cameras/DVRs/phones.
> As policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all.
The impetus to avoid transparency is the strongest indication I can observe that the state will be deprecated in favor of the internet in the coming centuries.