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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Police should be required to record all audio/video when making any kind of stop.

It's an official action. Instant dismissal if such recording is purposely incomplete, tampered with or "lost".

ps. that ACLU video is just not good on so many levels - they should replace it with something to reflect how serious this is

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It can also be very benefital for police aswell. It's a great defence against claims of police brutality and abuse. "That cop pushed me!" "We looked at the video, he didn't."

It's win win and helps make everyone honest.

Not "we looked at the video", but "here, take a look at this video". Don't trust the police to self-determine if they're at fault.

At least in Ohio most police cruisers are setup to record video+audio of stops and the police are supposed to use them at every stop. Whether or not that happens I don't know.

Unless it's recorded, there's a good chance they won't believe you. Oh, you have a bruise? That could have been caused by anything. Judges and juries tend to side with cops. So cops have little to gain by recording everything, which is of course why they are generally against it. They outlawed it in Illinois before it was overturned.

"Judges and juries tend to side with cops."

I see that becoming less and less true… A couple of recent examples locally:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cctv-exposes-police-lie-20120705-2...

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/tasered-for-not-showing-his-ticket...

It may becoming less true, with less meaning 95 rather than 100 percent of the time. There is tremendous inertia and precedent in the legal system to side with the officer over the citizen. This, along with judicial familiarity with local law enforcement (most traffic and municipal disputes by definition are raised by a few officers in a given jurisdiction) almost guarantee the lack of the possibility of fairness.

Amazing cases. Hope little brother continues to root out police abuse of citizens.

The part that bothers me about the first case linked is that the officers were submitted to an internal investigation. They should have been arrested as soon as the video evidence came to light. There is far too little willingless to arrest and imprison officers that betray public trust. I know it's also this way in the US; it's incredibly rare to see an officer fired, much less imprisoned.

Minneapolis claims that in the majority of cases, video of police encounters exonerates officers and eliminates frivolous claims.

That could be because in many of the cases where the police have done something wrong, they destroyed/confiscated evidence of that wrongdoing.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. So... what... you think the police shouldn't endorse recording of police encounters? Because I was giving an example of the police doing that.

You said that video usually supports the officers' statements, and not the civilians' statements, according to the official statistics. However, those statistics could actually be quite distorted, if the police regularly destroyed the video in those cases in which they were at fault.

I'm basically just saying that the statistics could be misleading.

I would think that if there was a general rule of police recording their stops, the lack of recording in a contested situation might be damning in itself.

Except it doesn't. Copy have had video in their cars for years but when abuse comes up it's generally off camera or the footage gets "lost". Both sides should be recording.

Even in jurisdictions where police make recordings, they use the recording to prepare their notes and then dispose of the recording.

This is an excellent video to watch in its entirety, but at 45:30 you can see a police officer proudly explain that he destroys recordings after he gets what he wants from them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

This might help explain the reason to have your own recording.

I think with the arrival of Project Glass and many such products (all it takes is for the market to pick-up), we'll eventually get the police to wear them. My only concern though is that the recording should in no way be owned by the police. It should be streamed directly to another agency.

Reminds me of Charles Stross' books Rule 34 and Halting State. LEOs (law enforcement officers) are required to wear such "life-loggers", and IIRC there's some sort of checksum on the video's integrity. There's an unobtrusive backup recorder for certain situations, and (of course) cases where the LEO will disable all of their recorders, with the attendant concerns of abuse.

> Police should be required to record all audio/video when making any kind of stop.

And you expect that to work? Police policing police.

No, it should be part of the judicial process like all other evidence gathering law. Judges and lawyers and juries policing police.

Of course not! You've got to call the Police police -- everyone knows Police police police Police.

This reminded me of this gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

You can use that as a buffalo sentence: police police police police police police police.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo... (and can I just say that this is an awesome Wikipedia URL.)

These are fun. "Fish" works too. Did you know that fish buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo fish? I think that any sentence of the form "(buffalo|fish)+" is valid in at least one way.

Fish isn't an adjective, is it? How would you interpret "Fish fish fish fish" as a sentence?

(Fish fish fish) fish. Fish which are fished by other fish themselves fish something unspecified.

Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforcem...

They're starting to do this with the Vic Police in Melbourne. The police are predictably upset about it.

Some departments do that. Unfortunately the tapes sometimes get lost. Go figure.

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