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Comment by nilved | Hacker News Reader

People need to realize that if body cameras don't have public live streams they are entirely negative for the general population. They'll be used against you in court and "strangely malfunction" when they could be used in your favor.

It's very dangerous to give the police complete control over video evidence, which is why I feel body cameras are a misguided attempt at sousveillance. Instead, we should be setting up public live streams in public areas, and controlling the recordings ourselves.

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Police enter private homes and businesses of people in the process of rescuing people. They also help in domestic abuse cases and other personal issues that people would not want broadcasted over live stream.

It's important to make the video available to the public but I believe it should only be made available with a court order. Otherwise, people will start to fear calling the police for help because their personal problems will be streaming live to the world.

> It's important to make the video available to the public but I believe it should only be made available with a court order.

This is the same problem. There isn't going to be a court order when you're attempting to prosecute the police.

> Otherwise, people will start to fear calling the police for help because their personal problems will be streaming live to the world.

If people are going to fear calling the police, it's because they murder people and their pets and then prosecute them for their drugs. I fear calling the police because of their brutality and lack of accountability, so I think this is still an upgrade.

The data from previous programs contradicts what you're saying. If that was the case, we would expect the number of complaints to rise while the number of officers punished would drop. This is not what has happened.[1][2][3]

It's possible these reports are mis-representing the situation in some way, so I would love to see how this squares with your claim.

[1] http://voiceofsandiego.org/2014/03/28/fact-check-do-police-c... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/wearable-video-ca... [3] http://www.wkrn.com/story/23033687/use-of-body-cameras-decre...

The real question is "which way is the lens pointed?" It's not a profile shot of the officer, twirling his nightstick, that is being recorded. The camera is pointed towards us with the master files being left with the 5-0. But NPYD are sqeaky clean moralists so no bother (1)

Stream them public is a nice idea - but I think we can safely assume that will never happen.

(1) Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded his NYPD bretheren who were manipulating crime stats for illegal arrests. 20mins but fascinating http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...

Everyone, please listen to this This American Life segment, the best public radio segment I have ever heard. Now imagine if he did not have a tape recording. He might still be in the mental hospital the police committed him to. That's the possibility for everyone pulled over today by police without body cameras.

While I think you make a good point, public live streams have downsides as well. I think there's a higher risk of vigilante justice when snippets can become widespread so easily (perhaps without context). There's also the likelihood of police officers viewing things that should be private outside of official business, like identification documents, etc. I listen to local police frequencies often and even with that I hear all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be public knowledge.

Right. Happened in the Boston Marathon Murders.

>"strangely malfunction" when they could be used in your favor.

There is precedent for courts to dismiss cases due to technicalities in police conduct or how evidence was gathered. It seems reasonable for courts (or lawmakers) to establish that lack of video invalidates an arrest.

True, but the bigger problem arises when you need that footage to prosecute a LEO.

The use of police testimony as sacrosanct needs to disappear. Bits or it didn't happen.

It wouldn't have to be public live streams in my view.

Closed circuit transmission to a third-party who assumes liability for missing archives would suffice.

This isn't a very useful proposal, unless there's also a proposal to somehow separate the incentives of the police from the incentives of the party responsible for the recordings.

What incentives would the 3rd party have to destroy recordings? They would be liable, and could be held in contempt.

Presumably they would be paid to record and archive from the LEO feeds, with an expectation of storage durability and availability. That would be their primary incentive.

Exactly. Where I live in Oakland police lapel cameras have been required for a while, but there's never footage when cops are accused of abuse.

Part of the problem is technical, lapel cameras don't have infinite battery and they don't have a wireless connection. That means that the cop has to remember to turn it on and off and he has to upload the video. Both provide the street cops with opportunities to not make video available.

Your public streaming idea isn't really that easy technically. Each cop would have to carry a smartphone with a large battery pack to pull it off.

Then there's the endless footdragging when you try to request the video which provide police management and district attorneys with ways to not make the the video available unless you're really persistent and have a lot of time.

For the camera policy to work, we need cameras that are always on, for the entire shift. Officers should not even be able to turn them off. They should be issued at the beginning of the shift already turned on, and passed in to an independent controller at the end of a shift who downloads the video to an archive that is accessible by citizen petition. If footage of a reported abuse is missing, that should be an automatic guilty.

Indeed, what could be better than having both Big Brother and Little Brother taping your every move!

Huge fines should be imposed for whatever footage is subpoenaed and subsequently found to be "corrupted" or "missing". That's the only way this could work, while still protecting the privacy of the citizens with which police interact.

Then we should all wear body camera.

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