Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right to Leave Body Cameras Off

The Fifth Amendment does not extend to physical evidence or other non-testimonial evidence, even if such evidence is potentially incriminating. For example, courts have held that things like blood samples, fingerprints, handwriting samples, and even video or audio recordings do not fall under the protection of the Fifth Amendment because they are not considered testimonial in nature.

The report notes that it is the police chief, not a lawyer representing him, who is making the preposterous argument that the Fifth Amendment justifies his conduct. Any lawyer who tried to make that argument would be made a laughing stock.

Indeed, I would think that this internal affairs report, where the chief is essentially admitting that he knew he'd done something wrong and was trying to prevent incriminating evidence from being recorded, would be pretty damning in front of a jury, because it establishes that he was well aware of the recklessness of his conduct.

Our PD wanted to roll out Flock cameras villagewide, and citizen involvement commissions ratcheted down the deployment to a handful of cameras, which are not authorized for use for stopping even stolen vehicles, just violent crime suspects and stolen license plates. The PD wanted it to be otherwise, but it does not take a lot of public pressure to rein them in: the ABQ city council is the boss, not the police chief.

I'm not saying Reason is wrong; they're clearly right, and this person is a moron. But I'm strongly urging people to engage locally on stuff like this, rather than bloodying their foreheads on national politics. Or, worse, convincing themselves that there's nothing at all to be done about it; that's what people like this ABQ Chief are counting on.

Stuff like this certainly makes it seem like cops are more interested protecting their own power and their cushy pension packages and their corrupt fringe benefits.

I'm actually generally sympathetic to law enforcement officers. Most (but not all) cops are good cops. And it's a hard job. But it should be a hard job. After all, law enforcement is granted an unprecedented, exclusive power no one else has, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force. With great power comes great responsibility (and accountability). Law enforcement officers are employees of the state (which represents the people). When "we the people" collectively hire a few individuals to exercise violent force on our behalf, it's reasonable that we also require digital accountability, including GPS, video and audio recording as a term of that employment.

2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs.

3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads.

4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process.

Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.

If you have additional authority you also have additional accountability.

When acting as an agent of the government, you don't have the same set of rights (both more and less) as one would have when acting in a commercial (agent of a corporation) or individual capacity. These are all very distrinct and (somewhat reasonably) well demarcated legal roles.

These fundamental principles (with varying levels of default qualified immunity) have been established across many sovereigns for centuries.

This person is a moron.

They are expected to fill out a duty log as a part of their job which may be used in an evidentiary capacity, and any failure to ensure that an issued piece of equipment is not used in support of that is a dereliction of duty.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/10/05/cities-where...

More recent data here: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

Claims that someone was “just minding their own business” shows them with a weapon and such.

I do not understand the resistance from some police.

This police chief has no business leading other officers if this is the kind of example he sets. I understand the instinct to protect oneself, but undermining public trust to avoid a traffic citation and a substantiated complaint from a police review board should be beneath the chief of police or any officer.

The gall to fuck up Todd's day and say footage is optional

Even if he is right (I firmly believe he is not) and police have a right not to incriminate themselves via body cam footage, this would only preclude courts from using footage as evidence of a cop's crimes. But what if the footage also contains evidence that a criminal defendant is innocent?

Chief Medina throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Of course the solution is not to turn off body cams. They serve a massive public good apart from catching police malfeasance - though that's good too.

The police do not have a constitutional right to prevent bad PR or boxing cops in on the facts with video.

It's not far from claiming that grocery and retail thief's have a right to ask stores to turn off their security cameras so that they can steal from them.

The police making this argument should be taken as a general admission that by turning the cameras off, they intend to do something illegal. Otherwise the fifth amendment argument would be irrelevant.

Solution: Since the third party doctrine removes fourth and fifth amendment protections from everyone, just have Facebook or Google run the body cameras.

But the camera he's wearing, as part of his job, should stay on and be allowed in court.

Remember that any cop shortages are really just a shortage of honest cops.