Phone Cameras and Apps Help Speed Calls for Police Reform

If you're careful, riding a bicycle through the desert and mountains is pretty safe. The most dangerous part are roads with narrow shoulders and lots of truck traffic. You can almost always find a lightly-traveled road to get you where you want to go. You should carry lots of water in the desert, but you should be fine if you run out and don't panic. I never ran out, but I was pretty confident if I did I could just sit still and wait for a passing motorist to share some water.

Motorcycles still have license plates, and I got pulled over more than once for speeding. But there seems less incentive for an officer to try and search a motorcycle than search a car. So you might deal with fewer overzealous police officers on a motorcycle than in a car.

Over the last 20 years, I've put well over 220k miles in on a variety of cars, and have gotten pulled over exactly four times, all of which were for unarguably justified reasons.

(in fairness, I'm a white dude and they're not gonna pull me for 'driving while black')

We have seen how keeping cameras on police moderates their behaviour. I wonder if that "reverse surveillance" could also moderate things like unjustified stops when one is driving?

Please enjoy your anonymous public transport to the fullest for me. :(

I'm curious how you think that privacy is stronger now than any other time in history?

While the "small town" / "small group" effect was definitely present in the past, if you ran afoul of said group, you could always leave it (and the stigma) behind. Now the Internet allows people to inspect your history wherever you go. It becomes inescapable. This is something that has never existed in the past (aside from becoming so super-infamous that news travels between disparate groups, I guess).

I did consider that one cannot always get on the Internet, but I didn't mention it in my writeup. The device could upload the recording whenever the Internet was available.

That would leave the problem that the cops know you've got such a gadget, so they prevent you from going to a wifi spot. For this we use the kind of mesh network as was used in the Hong Kong protests a few months ago. I think they didn't write that app themselves, it was already available from the App Store or Google Play.

Most phones have wifi, bluetooth and 4G. If any one of those can connect - somehow - to the Internet then we can upload.

The problem with battery life would be hard to solve on an actual phone but not hard at all to solve on dedicated hardware. A very, very large chunk of your power consumption goes into managing hardware security and virtual memory.

If you had no security at all, and no virtual memory, then you use quite a lot less power. That's quite common with embedded applications, such as TI DPSs running SYSBIOS (previous DSP/BIOS). I have some experience with DSP/BIOS it would not be hard at all to make a device the size of an iPhone that could run for a week or two between recharges.

The device would be a lot more acceptable to most people if it were not plainly visible. Suppose the camera lens could be clipped to your shirt, but the rest of the device is in your pants pocket or your purse, with a bluetooth connection between the two.

I fully understand there are many problems with this concept, but solving these kinds of problems is what engineers actually do to feed their hungry children. :-D

The main problem is that it is risky and expensive to operate an exit node. It's not a big deal to have an internal node.

I expect such an app would be quite popular; if one were able to calculate how much server capacity was required for each recorder, then a retail price could be found that would keep the network within capacity.

Another possibility is that while I assert it would be best to always be recording, sometimes it would be acceptable to do so in low fidelity.

High fidelity audio these days is quite compact.

Had better audio recording been present at JFK's assassination, there would be no doubt as to who fired the shots. Today's Ogg Vorbis or MP3 would be great for that; back then they were using reel-to-reel recorders on police car radios.

Perhaps an accelerometer would help. If nothing bad is happening one wouldn't expect there to be much acceleration. But if you hear a scream or a gunshot, even if you don't aim your phone at it you are startled so that you jump up, look around or maybe even run away. At that point the app would increase its video fidelity - or use less compression.

Most of the time it would use high compression, low resolution or monochrome.

This kind of video doesn't really need to be in color. 8-bit grayscale NTSC video his highly compressible

There's a Illinois State Trooper that lives in my neighborhood. He drives his work vehicle home and ALWAYS parks it illegally. There's a sign saying "no parking" with an arrow pointing right at where he put his car.

Of course he's never ticketed. But this grates me every time I walk by. He is entrusted with enforcing our laws, but can't be arsed to follow them every single night when he parks.

It is a huge erosion of trust in their institution.

In Portland, a total of four PPB officers murdered two mentally ill men in cold blood. They were not prosecuted; the grand jury and PPB internal affairs cleared them.

The family of one of the victims sued and won $2M. I don't clearly recall whether it was a jury verdict or a settlement.

In the other case I don't think there was a lawsuit however the federal government found that the PPB wasn't properly trained to deal with the mentally ill. My own more-recent experience that the PPB is quite good, for example I'd see someone going totally bananas at the Portland Rescue Mission and the cops would show right up, then be completely reasonable, pleasant and polite.

On the other hand, the Santa Cruz Police Department is quite oppressive to the homeless and mentally ill. That led to the Occupy Santa Cruz movement raising quite a lot of Hell, but with the eventual result that things got quite a lot better for the homeless and quite a lot worse for the cops.

   edit: s/better/worse/

But they are quick to criticize bad cops in other jurisdictions. Thus when I told a Reno deputy about the OHSU campus cops who beat me up, he got furiously angry, wanted to help me bring them to justice, but I - politely - refused his offer. He has a lot of work to do, I want to take care of that myself

Around here, to get hired as a police officer or a deputy, one has to pass quite a rigorous background check.

I once had a girlfriend who described herself as "a former law enforcement officer". She never called herself a "police officer" or a "sheriff's deputy", however she was quite expert at handling firearms.

I eventually concluded that she had been a Cadet for the Sheriff, that is, a trainee. The Cadets assist with various law enforcement work but they never actually carry out the actual enforcement.

I figure that someone clued in to that she was mentally ill.

I fear my hallucations; she shoots at them!

Some of my very best friends are convicted murderers.

I regard them as nice people and good friends. On the other hand, those folks are never ever going to get out of the state forensic hospital.

There is no way to verify your claim. In my own antidotal world, I have seen cops ruin people's lives by harassment, and revenue collection!

There are two statements made by Eric Holder's Justice Department that didn't get the traction I felt they needed:

“Local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way of generating revenue,” Holder said

Officers in Ferguson “routinely violate the Fourth Amendment,” Holder said, and stop citizens without reasonable suspicion and then use unreasonable force against them. Incidents often “blatantly cross the line,” he said.

This investigation was specific to Ferguson, Missouri, but I have a feeling they are systemic problems in many towns and cities across America.

I have no way if proving my own personal suspicions about the average Cop, in the average police department, but I don't trust them anymore. I know I have been pulled over for no reason. I have been ticketed for incidents I honestly didn't think I committed. I'm a white dude living in a wealthy community; I often wonder how minorites are treated in other parts of the country?

(I have no answers to the injustices I see, other than arming your vechicle, and person with a video cam. The problem I see now is most cops will be on the lookout for any recording devise.)