Police Body Cameras: What Good Is a Video You Can't See?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Because body cams will capture footage of victims and associates and bystanders, as well as perpetrators and officers, there's an inherent tension between protecting the privacy of everyone in a video and allowing those in the video to see the captured footage of themselves. Every "simple" solution I can think of (including all of the ones described in the article), I can easily envision scenarios where that proposed solution would seem to be inappropriate.
I suspect the way we handle police body cam videos will be a point of contentious debate for another decade or more.
I think at the very least if the videos are kept secret until judicial review, then the police officers should be forced to keep them on all the time during work hours. The videos should also be automatically uploaded somewhere where that police department can't control what happens to the videos.
There was a case here a few years ago where someone accused the police of assaulting them when they went in to report something (misconduct by a police officer from my vague memory). The police station had cctv cameras, but when the court asked for the video, the 20mins around the time claimed by the victim was "missing due to technical difficulties" - curiously the _only_ missing video in the preceding 18 months or any subsequent time.
If the police get to collect and only use the video when it suits them, I'd like to see "presumption of innocence" not apply (to police) when normally expected bodycam footage is missing.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-cadet-turns-cop-turn...
SWAT team about to enter a home or use a "no-knock" warrant? They aren't allowed to turn off the camera there. Same for the vast majority of the other police actions that happen in public.
Unfortunately, I'm sure the cops will find some loopholes to abuse this, too, and turn off the cameras when they aren't supposed to, especially if nobody ever punishes cops for such actions (which they don't), but I'd probably still take that over making all footage private by default. In many cases the cops doing bad things would still get caught because they forgot to turn off the camera or didn't think ahead to do it.
The rest of the time it should be kept and unwatched. Ideally, I also think it would be best if everyone had to give sworn statements before they knew what was or wasn't on video (so nobody gets to change stories to match...) and that the video was stored, archived, etc. by an outside agency that doesn't answer to either party. But I wonder how much of that they'd be able to accomplish.
Either the cameras are on all the time, or you can forget about them.
And then back that up with career advancement metrics designed to motivate individual cops to ensure their camera gear is working and reliable. Missing 2% of your bodycam footage a week without having made a documented effort to get it repaired/replaced is a warnable offence. Missing more than 5% you get your pay docked. Miss 5% more than twice in a calendar year is a sackable offence. Any claims made in court about events that happen while your bodycam footage is unavailable remove your usual police department protection, and expose you to civil suits that you're normally shielded from. If a civil suit rules that "in the balance of probabilities" you were wrong, you become personally exposed to damages.
As the law & order types love to say "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to fear." It cuts both ways.
There's a wider culture issue with American police organisations, and my understanding is that the situation varies wildly across different states and cities. I don't think that adding complex camera usage rules will help a lot.
I'm not American, and in my country of 5.5 million people the police use the gun about 50 times a year; in this context, pointing gun at someone counts as "using" the gun and needs to be reported. In 2013 the police fired six bullets (training shots are obviously not counted, but warning shots are).
And that six bullets is not per one policeman, they are for the entire police force of 7800 police officers.
And yes, the general public here has almost as many firearms per capita as the Americans do. It's just a different culture. Not one without violence or homicide, but still quite different, from the police point of view.
Have you given any thought to the implications of wearing a camera for 8-12 hours a day? Cops need to use the bathroom too... Body cameras will always need to have the ability to be turned off.
As someone else mentioned, sometimes bystanders are caught on film doing something they don't want others to know they do -- they're at the "wrong" kind of club, religious service, political event, restaurant, etc. from the perspective of their family or social circle.
And yes, these same concerns apply to other types of cameras -- particularly those that, like police body cameras, might also be used inside private spaces. That doesn't mean we should be "outraged", but we should be concerned about the potential dangers posed by a default expectation of public release.
Finally, I completely agree that police should have to keep their body cameras on during work hours, though there needs to be some solution for restroom breaks.
I mean what does it take to put a cop in prison when a video of him strangling someone to death is not enough?
He was not strangled to death. He died because he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, and he was laid prone on the ground. It is well known that this makes it very difficult for most people (and _especially_ overweight/obese people) to breath. This is explicitly against NYPD protocol, and in my opinion, everyone on that scene (EMS included) should have been charged in his death.
A great article on how hard it is to fire a cop because of the rules police unions have managed to get into place. http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/19/how-special-rights-for...
Firing someone is much different from not throwing out a court case against them. I can see how police unions have a lot of leverage over the executive branch, but I'm not sure how they extend that leverage over the judicial branch.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-poli...
You have to be accused of a crime before a Judge gets involved. That was the whole point I was making. The unions do their best to keep the officer from ever being charged. Got to love the down votes on my previous post, ignorance is of the power of these unions are why we have the problems in the police we do today.
Even politicians run scared as some city unions have put up billboards next to homes of politicians who dare challenge them.
It would be far better if a completely independent quasi-citizen/law enforcement organization were required to review use of force by police, and empowered to charge them. Also, having local DA's prosecute cops looks to be a disaster, as well as having the normal grand jury in the loop. Maybe a second grand jury is needed, but made up of poor people instead.
Unions may be far from perfect but your arguments aren't convincing or even particularly relevant. Crying about the downvotes just makes me want to use mine. Maybe the downvotes are because your tone is too trollish.
I have to wonder if, in the end, what what we'll end up with is universal surveillance, not imposed by police, but imposed on ourselves. It will just be assumed that everyone and every building will be recording video all the time. At that point, it won't matter if police are recording or not.
A defendant should be innocent until proven guilty -- and those videos apply just as well. Is the police video for or against you? The court should decide.
If the video is "missing", a outside authority should investigate and weight should be given to the possibility that evidence was tampered with by the police. The public should demand this just as we have body-cameras.
There are certainly some good reasons why such videos shouldn't be (by default).
> Why not have our judicial system decide/review police video on a case-by-case basis, rather than having them be public records?
The judicial system has already shown itself to be inadequate in the matter of self-oversight.
There doesn't seem to be any reason not to make all footage from public areas generally available.
Would you want that footage to be publicly available?
Likewise, would you want everyone who ever hated you to have access to that footage to use however they want? Once the cat's out of the bag...
Edit: Other fun situations:
1. You're attacked by someone and can't run, but have enough experience/training to subdue them; the cops show up later and the video doesn't show you being attacked, so you look like the aggressor.
2. You're attacked and can't defend yourself or fail to such an extent that people would look at the video and laugh at you.
3. You're on video doing something incredibly out of the norm for you, whatever the reason.
4. You're on video in a PLACE that you wish other people didn't know you frequented. A strip club, a gay bar, a church, a vegan grocery store, a pot dealer, etc.
5. You're on video doing something that your friends/family would react negatively to. Let's say you're a doctor and someone has a heart attack at Political Rally Green. You're up front and on camera for everyone else to see, including your family, who are all diehard Red supporters.
CCTV would also be even more unpopular if it came with sound and instead of recording largely uninteresting ongoings in public spaces, it was used to record intrusions into other people's houses at particularly stressful times and record their stuttering non-answers to very intimate questions and accusations they're often ultimately proved to be entirely innocent of.
As for the rest (people would laugh at you if they saw the video?), that's pretty weak stuff.
Personally, I think the DEFAULT should be "sealed" and then video for times X to Y should be unsealed as necessary for cases.
> As for the rest (people would laugh at you if they saw the video?), that's pretty weak stuff.
I think that depends on who you are. Some people take being the object of popular ridicule better than others.
I think most people would agree that the video should come into evidence if someone ends up dead. Also, most people would agree that videos should not all be released publicly. But there are a lot of difficult situations between those two extremes.
Even if the rules about releasing footage are quite restricted, I think body cameras will influence the behavior of police. Not always for the better necessarily, but I think they will reduce the number of fatal police shootings.
False accusations go both ways - police are accused of acting improperly and criminals are (obviously) accused of acting improperly.
A good cop should never act improperly but may be accused of it, and they'd want evidence that it isn't the case.
Likewise, I'll tell a personal story. I tend to drive fast. I've not had many tickets but I've had a few. Two really cool police gave me warnings a handful of years back instead of tickets; not just a warning but they reminded me of the car seat in the back, my family and suggested I slow down to be safer. It had a dramatic impact, I'd just get pissed off and pay a ticket but the warning, that they chose to give, stuck with me more and I've slowed down. Could that be done by a robot police officer that never takes breaks and follows the law literally and letter by letter? What if those cops had a record of giving certain races warnings but came down hard on other races?
im not against body cameras, especially in the current world of paramilitary style police, but it seems like there is a need for some human wisdom on a case by case basis here. Simple fixes could easily have some bad outcomes.
If this cadet (not an officer) hadn't (probably) thrown his career chances out the window, the officer involved would never have been held accountable and probably would continue to do it again in the future: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-cadet-turns-cop-turn...
And, as others mentioned, as long of departments just hand out paid vacations, prosecutors refuse to press charges, and judges let officers go, video cameras won't matter.
We're currently experiencing a shift to authoritarianism by the backdoor with NSA and friends, and in such times cheap and effective solutions such as this, which achieve the stated goal and no more, should be championed I think.
On the one hand, I would like the footage to be fully released but what about instances similar to people being swatted[0]? Surly there should be limits in place but can we really trust police to be ethical?
Hopefully more people comment but surely there will be more of these types of articles written in the future as body cams continue to roll out.
and if the camera "turns out" to be on the fritz, they can provide the IT support ticket, complete with dates and times entries were made.
Then use a REAL BLUR.
A lot of the posts here end up on Reddit and vice versa. Big part of this I suspect is due to the fact that most people here use both sites pretty regularly, I surely do.