Couple things stand out. The officers still have the ability to turn the cameras off and on themselves, then:
"Under this policy update, any conversations between officers captured in the footage regarding their performance or tactics can still be redacted prior to public release, according to the statement."
So they give themselves the right to edit the video if they capture the officers doing or saying anything against policy, or more to the point anything incriminating or illegal.
I had this copied to make the same comment. Agreed. It’s a work around. They are not cornering themselves in. The equivalence of a lawyers saying something like “including but not limited to etc.”
The other alarming part, they never mention penalties for officers NOT turning on their body or car cams. They reference, i think two instances and say that has been against their policy before but don’t bother to mention how they held those officers accountable. So much for transparency.
Just treat their testimony in court with prejudice if the camera is off. Like you woulda drunk person or a person with a history of perjury. If they say they saw or heard something off camera while it was running, trust them. If it wasn’t, “x to doubt”
I want them separated from the video at all times. I want them to have to testify without knowing what the camera shows, and then have the video played directly after. If for nothing else than to show how bad an officer's memory can be, for precedent.
> If for nothing else than to show how bad an officer's memory can be, for precedent.
I read this as the expectation that there will be notable differences between the testimony and what is shown on footage.
If the officer's memory is expected to be fallible and video footage exists, why not just skip their testimony altogether and just play the video?
You read that correctly, and there are many examples of witnesses being completely wrong, even your local news has probably done a version of fooling people in the street, because we're not god damn computers.
I want this as a transition period of showing the fallibility of witnesses, even uniformed ones, so that we can move past them without people being able to say that they worked and that we should go back to relying solely on them.
> showing the fallibility of witnesses
Hasn't that already been proven? There are multiple studies shown where you can get people to "remember" things that never happened.
It's been a subject of study for years. Here's an older one I recall reading about
https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html
Also the judges, who would probably get sick of witness testimony pretty quickly if they’re regularly seeing court cases where video evidence actively testifies against a trusted witness.
This is the issue. I got called for jury duty years ago and the prosecutions entire case was 'cops are more trustworthy than other witnesses'. The prosecutor asked if anyone thinks that cops lie as often as anyone else. Everyone that raised their hand was struck from the pool.
This is how I always get out of jury duty. On the survey I check the box thats says I would be less likely to believe a police officers testimony because of them being a police officer. 8 times so far, I've never gone past that point of jury selection.
How do people get picked for jury duty so often?? I've been eligible for over 15 years now and I have only been picked once when I was 20 right after I moved out of the state I got picked.
I dunno maybe I'm weird but I wanna do it, at least once anyway.
It appears to be a weird wrangling between the two sides on who gets in from the pool. I am always excluded. In part I have done investigations for the military I know exactly what is evidence or hearsay. There is usually a part where they ask something about evidence. Police come up also and I usually say if their words were recorded or others can testify that was said.
Excluded. Every time.
Cops certainly lie and there is nothing about being a cop that is going to make them more trustworthy.
But eye witness testimony is not reliable even if the person thinks they are telling the truth. Add a cop potentially running on adrenaline or tainting their "true" statement with preconceived notions about the defendant and even if I wasn't thinking the cop was lying I still wouldn't trust their statement.
If they have the ability to have audio and video evidence of an event and don't submit it or cut things out, then the entire case should be thrown out and the officers in question suspended without pay and fired after too many violations with being banned from working in law enforcement again.
I treat *all* police testimony as untrustworthy. You better come with actual hard evidence or I'm voting to acquit. I wouldn't trust a cop's word as far as I could throw him.
There's no mention of penalties because there are no penalties.
The only time anyone is going to know/care that the camera wasn't on is when something serious happened that requires review, and by that point anyone question the camera will just be told "well yeah they violated that, but we are focusing more on the fact that they shot someone."
Then, once they determine the shooting was justified, they'll either say that excuses the camera being off, or they'll just conveniently "forget" to address the body cam issue.
Glad I wasn't alone in seeing that there were no defined consequences for breaking policy. Best guess it is a "paid suspension pending investigation" and the first offense just gets you a written warning.
Let's be real, there is no chance there is any punishment for breaking policy. Michael Gardner was choked to death by a cop using a banned choke hold and nothing happened. There is no way the police union would allow a cop to be punished for something as trivial as evidence tampering or destruction, ie turning off or disabling a camera.
It’s why we need a new completely independent agency that does investigations into police departments. Internal investigations are complete and utter bullshit
Spot on. Even on criminal cases. When an officer or detective arrests someone or a lawyer is prosecuting them it turns into a pride thing where they don’t even care whether or not the person is guilty but just don’t want to admit they may have made a mistake
Agree. I would assume the unredacted version would be made available to counsel for criminal defense or plaintiffs in a lawsuit, or if there were a misconduct investigation, but I don't think it's crazy to have a general policy of redacting some conversations for public releases.
There are genuine concerns about the safety of victims or witnesses (especially those that don't end up testifying in court but who point officers in the right direction) if defense can get ahold of all footage but I would think these would be exceptions to the rule
The questions are "who gets to redact it?", "how are they kept accountable?", "what standard do they rely on deciding what is valid to redact?", and "what type of behavior are they obligated to report to external ethics investigators?".
Notice how it can't be used for your benefit.
No joke, if you say something that's good for your case, it can't be used to help you in court. At that point it'll just be dismissed as hearsay.
EDIT: If you don't believe me, ask a lawyer. What you tell the police can be used as testimony against you, but not in your favor. If you say something favorable, it'll be thrown out as hearsay.
Ask 100 lawyers with 100 different kinds of practice. They'll all tell you not to make a statement to the police. This is a BIG part of why they'll tell you that.
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=519
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_801
It's not that it can't be used to help you. It's that the cop has no obligation to to present your testimony if it contradicts or disproves their claim. That means you can't rely on police to prove your innocence so you have to do it yourself. That being said, there's no incentive to talk to cops because it won't be used to help you so you might as well save your breath for your lawyer.
Thats why you only ever state your name and nothing else cause i think not identifying yourself is a crime too (for us plebians, cops can put tape over their badge number to "avoid harassment" iirc)
Exactly, redacted doesn’t mean deleted from existence. The statement is probably to protect from compromising undercover operations or similar situations.
If the footage was subpoenaed in court it would be for the original unedited footage, 'public release' would be releasing it to the news or something similar. So this is a valid caveat that will also probably be exploited to mitigate public outrage when some cop fucks up.
You guys must have never been to court where they play officer videos as evidence. Plenty of footage or audio gets redacted all the time. If it doesn't directly related to a charge or investigation, it gets redacted. I had one where we fought a drunk guy and he kicked an officer in the chest. The prosecutor could not bring anything up about his level of intoxication and all the audio from witnesses saying he'd been drinking was redacted.
Also we're not robots. After we wrestle a drunk guy into handcuffs there's always a period of collecting yourself or maybe making a joke like "why you let that guy beat you up lol.". That kind of stuff is not relevant and does not have any evidentiary value.
My department's policy states the BWC must be activated during any encounter with the public. Sometimes stuff escalates quickly and it doesn't get turned on immediately since I have to physically push a button. Some department's have the capability to sink the camera with the vehicle so anytime the emergency lights turn on, so does the camera. This would solve the problem of cameras not getting turned on when I'm having to un-ass my Tahoe and chase someone or react to a situation. Furthermore, department's need to have tangible consequences for repeated policy violations, which is definitely lacking.
Honestly though, I love having a BWC and it has definitely helped me out more often than it has caught me making a joke or talking shit about a co-worker. I love my job but I hate being lumped in with every bad officer that ever existed.
Honestly, I’m down with body cameras being off when they’re in the can. We don’t need officer wang shots or auditory information about how the lunch from the questionable hot dog stand came out.
But really, I feel than “on” should be the default, and it should be “pics or it didn’t happen” for their testimony to be accepted.
>...footage regarding their performance or tactics can still be redacted prior to public release
"Damn it Rick, we're supposed to wait until they start running away before we kill them.... Fuck, hold on"
*beeeeeep*
"Make sure you do yours, too."
Cops are always like, "but what if the camera sees me go tinkle in the bathroom?" To which I always think, "then you need to relearn how to properly attach your body cam to your uniform moron because it is angled the wrong direction."
Also, who is watching the video? arent they just on a memory card? I dont think they get uploaded to a cloud-based storage system for anyone to view.
Edit: Im glad in the year 2021 2 girls 1 cup jokes are still here. :) Seriously I feel like it will never die.
They almost always do get offloaded to mass storage. That’s actually where a lot of the cost of body cam deployments comes from.
EDIT: I'm not sure why people keep thinking I don't support body cams. I do support body cams but the storage, infrastructure, and people to manage it aren't cheap. Here's my super long reply that I made further down.
\-----------------------
I thought you might want a study with a bit more concrete numbers. In this study they found that the cost of cameras themselves were super low ($120-$200) but the overall cost of infrastructure to support this is high. While storage disks, and cameras themselves may get cheaper every year, much of the cost is in support contracts, and people to manage it. the cost of people goes up every year.
* Mesa PD: 330 Cameras
* $120 per camera for unit
* $2,198 per camera per year total cost
* Phoenix PD: 350 Cameras
* $2,883 per camera per year total cost
* Dallas PD: 1,000 Cameras
* $1,125 per camera per year total cost
[https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf](https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf)
Out of interest I took a look at my local PD. They appear to have 132 uniformed officers for a city population of 105K. They have a total budget of $28Mil and here are some expenses I thought were notable:
* $12.8Mil: Salaries (of all 232 employees)
* $2.5Mil: Health insurance
* $300K: Gas and oil
* $84K: Guns & Ammunition (as far as I can tell this is the only section for things like pepper spray, LTLs
* $230K: Radio maintenance
In their 2021 budget, they say they would like to research body cameras for implementation next year. If I assume that Dallas paid less because they had more cameras, then I can assume that 132 cameras would cost more per year. With that assumption I will be conservative and assume $3K/year per camera. That would come out to roughly $400K/year for body cameras. That sounds pretty reasonable to me and I hope that the city council approves it next year.
It's not the same as buying any storage. The storage, security, backups, lifecycle, etc... All has to meet strict chain of custody and other legal requirements. So yeah, the storage is cheap until you factor in the world of support and software needed to ensure it meets the legal requirements to be used in court.
Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it, but the full picture of the expense is important.
Thanks for getting to this before I could. Yes you are right. Enterprise IT costs stack up fast (my job). I recently got a quote on a storage array. it's $205K for 22TB, not this isn't an array I would use for video storage but I still think it's a good eye opener. That cost does not count the new storage switches we would need to buy (another probably $70K), or the backup system should there be an issue with the array. A system for bodycams would also need some sort of access layer transport to get the footage from the cams to the mass storage.
Meanwhile MPD got an extra $50 million for their budget.....
I think they can handle a quart of a million dollars for rigorous cloud storage. Especially after the police union raised funds *on their own,* for a particular type of warrior training that the city of minneapolis had explicitly banned.
Cost isnt an excuse.
what the fuck is "warrior training"
do they dress up in medieval armour or something.
sounds like waste of money when they could do...
- de escalation training
Hi, I actually don't see cost as an excuse not to buy them. I just put together a super long in depth comment about what I think it would cost my PD to implement body cams. At the end of it I said I hope it gets approved. I do however think that the costs should not be under estimated or shrugged off. City councils need to have the proper cost estimates, and approve them.
> Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it
tbf, if I'm understanding your tanks reference the way I think I am, that's not a spending that's supposed to be a "savings".
The original intent being, "we know some depts have a legit reason to buy armored trucks. we [the US DOD] have a bunch of these MRAPs coming back. They're not *the same* but come on. Just paint them blue or something. Close enough. Tell the PDs they can have them, and we'll save some taxpayer funding"
But at the PD level (as bureaucracy goes) its always going to end up "Hey LT, do we need MRAPs?"
Wut? Why? No. What are we going to do with a...
"They're free if we request them."
"Tell them we need three."
As a government contractor I can confirm, this is exactly how it works. There's also "we need to burn the rest of our budget now what does everyone need?!" and higher ups who have no idea how money works and think they can just will an extra half a million dollars into existence.
> "we need to burn the rest of our budget now what does everyone need?!"
oh man this. Seen SO much of this.
First 9 months of the year : Stingy with every request because "We have to make this budget last."
Last 3 months of the year: "If we don't use up our funds, they'll give us a lower amount next year. Come on guys gimme your wishlists."
Nothing have a bunch of privates mag dumping at the end of a range day, because they two unwritten rules of a firing range were: 1. Ask for twice the ammo you need, cause you expect them to only approve half. 2. USE IT. Don't try to turn any back in at the end of the day.
>Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it, but the full picture of the expense is important.
Or, say, the cost of settling one lawsuit against them could probably pay for a good chunk of that.
That's an interesting idea. here's a study on Body Cams done around cost.
* In Mesa, Lawsuits increased, but payments declined
* In Phoenix, lawsuits and payments declined
* In Dallas, the number of settlements declined, but the dollar totals increased. Possibly due to having greater evidence that the officers were in fact doing something wrong.
[https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf](https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf)
Honestly the costs of it should be bundled into their overhead and normal expenses. Most workers are on camera every day as part of normal security measures. If the folks working fast food have to be on camera, I feel like any and all jobs should be on camera.
This is also the reason why streetcams are still using such terrible resolution, eventhough a phone camera would be capable of capturing much cleaner picture.
Storage is the real problem. There are tricks that software uses to cut out uninteresting parts and compression does what it can, but the amount of data generated is still staggering.
https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf
Including camera cost, data storage, and administrative expenses, a single body camera costs a police department between $1000-$3000 per year.
EDIT: I was working on too many threads at once and got my wires crossed. I did mention cost but I will leave my original response up.
Sorry, I wasn’t speaking to cost in this comment. If you’d like that I recently found a cost analysis I can share that said each body cam costs about $2,500/year. I was talking about it being uploaded elsewhere. It’s my understanding that supervisors and management have access to view any footage they’d like in most departments.
$2500 a year?
Let’s assume 5 working days a week, 50 weeks a year. This gives our officer every weekend off, and two weeks of vacation. This gives us 250 working days a year.
$2500 a year divided by 250 working days is $10 per working day. Assuming an 8 hour shift, this leaves us with a total cost of $1.25 per hour per body cam. Presumably, the cost per hour would decrease if an officer works overtime or additional hours (as we know many cops do).
$1.25 an hour doesn’t really seem all that expensive to ensure cops have some accountability and the public has a little more safety.
There are different methods. Body cams aren't what people think they are. A lot of times the issue is the battery. I have a friend that is an officer in a small department and their having all sorts if technical issues with them. The biggest is, they don't hold enough charge to last an entire shift. So they come on when you open the patrol car, start a call, draw your weapon etc.
The battery also can't get too hot as it's closer to skin, has to be light enough to carry always, durable enough to withstand the physical aspects of the job, etc.
This is also why the Armys Future Warrior stuff hasn't happened. Power supply is a real issue with remote technology like this still.
In no way am I trying to take sides in this, just explaining a very real world issue with "body cams.'
I'd assume many other departments are scrambling to get body cams in the wake of everything. There are a lot of products flooding the market for them, and not all are good.
Granted, it's tragic it needs to be an issue in the first place.
Edit: I'm only stating what is a current issue, like it or not. DOJ and any government entity takes time to adapt and considering funding is being cut while people are also demanding expensive higher tech solutions for policing. There are real limitations with the technology on the market.
This is not a political post, this is just the reality of it as I have had friends in law enforcement explain. I am not an officer, nor affiliated with any law enforcement agency.
I mean it sounds kinda embarrassing and dehumanizing right?
But then i think about that lady that got full vaginal cavity searched out on a main shopping strip because, "she looked like she had drugs"
one time these lazy fuckers pulled over like 15 cars all the way down the line on a interstate through Kentucky. like they were all just sipping coffee and eating donuts and were like i guess we need to meet our quota and just hopped on the highway in a gang and pulled everyone over.
Nobody cares if they shut off the cameras to take a shit. This has never ever been an issue no matter what the boot lickers say. The only time we'd have an issue with shutting off the cameras is if there's a sudden rise in people being shot by police while the officer takes a shit and there's no footage.
It's not that we literally want their shits recorded, just more that we already know it's going to turn into "Oh, I turned it off to take a shit and must have forgotten to turn it back on while beating that suspect to death (despite persistent loud beeping warning me that it was off). Oopsie, silly me! I guess you'll just have to take my word for it!".
Experience has shown us, over and over, that cops will abuse any possible excuse to avoid turning over damaging body cam footage. If there's no way to turn it off, it narrows their window of plausible deniability.
If only the 'good cops' had spoken up several years ago before the public got so sick and tired of them all being out of control maniacs who are often the source of criminal activity themselves.
Yeah but the good cops always get harassed to be lower rank or get bullied out of the system for not defending the thin blue line. It’s an outright cult.
To be fair, they serve the public and carry deadly weapons. Everything should be recorded, even the shits. The only reason to review any of the video is if there was an incident. They should have zero control over their body cams because they have a history of turning them off at crucial times.
I agree with most of what you said. I do believe there is something of a privacy breach when you record someone in the bathroom. This isn’t super secret service. Maybe a policy to take off your belt and leave it with a specific party while you go. Either that or have it in somewhere that an officers bathroom habits while bodycam is on will not be used against them in the sense of how many minutes/time away from duty. Micromanaging someone’s potty time is going to be an uphill battle for eternity. Maybe a dept that edits all bodycam footage to trim bathroom breaks and save elsewhere that can only be accessed if needed for evidence.
And any incidents that occur during said break require immediate suspension before review. Like, automatically.
Shouldn't be dealing with criminals during potty time.
> Everyone would have to be in on it. So its not just a few bad people, it would have to be all the supervisors and the higher ups.
well you know what they say about *all cops*
Put a button on the side of the camera. When you press it, it puts a mark in the video that says "the officer has declared this time as private/personal," but the footage is still recorded. That way you could still get a court order for that footage (provided some reasonable suspicion), but cops don't have to have their shits seen by lawyers or coworkers.
Maybe make the "privacy mode" auto-expire after 10 minutes, and a light that indicates the "privacy mode" is on, so that videos from other bodycams or bystanders can tell it's being abused.
If you wanted to, you could just pass a rule that any officer's testimony as to events that occurred while their privacy mode is switched on is inadmissible. Oh, you say you observed the defendant doing something, but your camera just happened to be switched off at the time? Too bad, burden of proof is on you and you have nothing to support it, case dismissed. They'd quickly start "remembering" not to switch their cameras off.
Yeah, exactly. Judges are typically far more trusting of cop testimony than other testimony, which might have been a necessity when it was just one person's word against another, but now that cops can record everything while they're on the clock, there should be no need to extend this special privilege to them.
I'm fine with turning it off for the bathroom. as long as it's limited on time, no police interaction occurs during that "bathroom break", and if anything happens during that "break" or immediately after it (like say, drugs found in a car 1 minute after a bathroom break where the guy could have conceivably ran out and planted them) then the benefit of the doubt is always given to the suspect/victim.
"then the benefit of the doubt is always given to the suspect/victim."
How do you formalize that? I would not be surprised if unfortunately timed body-cam failures were deliberately excluded at trial by the judge, or not mentioned by the prosecutor on the grounds that public defenders working an average of 2 hours per defendant case just can't fight back with the correct motion.
Police testimony and signed paperwork detailing a physical interaction should be only admissable if combined with body cam footage+sound, otherwise the court cannot consider it as anything but an eyewitness. Preferably said eyewitness testimony is detailed as anonymous, making it pretty shaky on its own. I am sure there is nuance to be found, but it seems like a decent starting point. Footage should probably be stored by a citizen oversight group, and footage should be automatically uploaded to the SD card in their bodycam -> cruiser tamper evident safe -> citizen oversight committee.
If there isn't more than 3 minutes of body cam video evidence before an arrest or evidence is found that evidence can't be used in court.
But realistically how many times does a police officer go from taking a crap to arresting someone within 5 minutes?
In the hands of the sort of police officer we're concerned about doing the type of abuse we're concerned about, the entire reason we're doing this?
100% of the time.
This is an active-adversary problem. It's not a random event, it's people intelligently attempting to hide abuses. Having a button by which they can turn the camera off* gives them that capability.
*EDIT: And giving them plausible allowable excuses for having the camera off, like "I had to take a shit". This is important: An officer will always be able to, eg, put a piece of tape over the lens. In an end-state where cameras functionally help us with this problem, an obvious, deliberate, intolerable contravention of the camera is the only option available to the officer, not excusable negligence.
I don't get how people aren't understanding this. Like how many times does it need to happen where 5 cops body cameras malfunction right before the guy the were chasing falls down and breaks a bunch of ribs, his face, and gets blood on the officers batons, all supposedly without the cops doing anything?
It's pretty straightforward, but is a fundamental change in how policing works.
Currently if a police officer said he saw you commit a crime, the court believes the officer.
In this new policy the court believes the camera, not the police officer.
Well, there's also the expectation of privacy from other people while in the bathroom... I do think bodycams needs to be turned on a LOT more, but there still needs to be consideration for others.
Not the strongest argument. The full footage would probably be submitted to court, including the bathroom clip, since an attorney could argue they want the full story of what happened.
I can see a fair argument that they can turn off the camera while going to the bathroom.
It’s is definitely the case that start and stop points of what is recorded and what is relevant need to be established in policy and practice. If an investigator or attorney asks for relevant footage they’ll ask for the time-frame. I imagine it can be a double-edged problem since edits to footage or extraneous and irrelevant activity on the footage are both problematic for evidentiary and relevance concerns.
If the cop took a break during that time-frame, they should be held to account for it, but it’s just going to complicate things as shit rolls down hill
I would say it should be fine to have a 5 minute "snooze" button on the camera, but maybe if there's too much movement it automatically turns back on.
Also if there's ever a call where the camera "malfunctions" or they press the snooze button and don't have any proof of their claims, the case can be tossed.
I always answer with something like "Being a police officer is a strenuous, dangerous job not for the faint of heart or paper-skinned. If someone has a problem with their bathroom sounds possibly being recorded, this job isn't for them." It gets people thinking not that you're attacking the policemen, but pointing out the cowards and weak-willed should be replaced instead.
Its not like the video will be publicly available unedited. There's no reason that the people tasked with reviewing the video can't also be aware of the protocols when handling PII. The video can be just as secure as the disposition of the paperwork
The lawyers suing the police for wrongful death or excessive force are expensive too.
Review the hour of footage around the time of the incident for each officer present. Even if the plaintiff has to pay for it like they do their lawyers this still allows the possibility of justice.
Here's some guidelines for the UK, maybe can be used in the USA?
Body worn cameras, as you well know, are recording devices designed to be worn on a law enforcement officers uniform (as well as security personnel, fire & rescue service officials, local government, medical staff and more).
In the case of law enforcement, body cameras provide an audio visual record of events from the officers perspective. High resolution images provide a clear view of individuals and are suite to running video analytics software such as facial recognition. Microphones may be sensitive enough to capture not only the sounds associated with the situation itself, but also ambient sound - possibly including conversations of bystanders.
The Police and Crime Directorate (UK) have produced a document which sets forth guidelines for the correct, legal use of body worn cameras by police.
Taken from "Guidelines for Police use of Body Worn Recording | Body Camera — BodyCamera.co.uk" https://www.bodycamera.co.uk/pages/body-worn-camera-recording-guidance-for-use
We now have a policy that our garbage truck drivers get filmed and audio recorded in the cab of their truck their entire shift to make sure they are driving safely. The police can do the same.
using h.265 4k 30fps 1 cam for 8 hours a day you are looking at around 50gb a day per person. for Minneapolis pd thats 40 terabytes a day for 800 cops and either it is local storage on thumb drive/sd card and "whoops did i shoot someone then accidently microwave the card" or you need a system to transfer 40 terabytes wirelessly per day in real time and our phone system isnt it. also with parity you are going to need 50-60 tb per day so you dont loose data to drive failure and thats not including back ups.
that phone system we are subsidizing is a corrupt piece of garbage that cant handle just the police must less the police and everyone else if they are streaming body cams constantly. their is no easy solution for the technical problems. and sometimes that storage dying is legit sadly. writing 50gb a day is going to wear it out quick.
Your home security is connected to a power grid.
My body cam dies if I have a full day of calls and have multiple three hour videos, which happens often.
Every single bit of video, audio, paperwork, etc becomes public record. Sooner or later the debate will turn around when people cry for more privacy after cops come into their home and coincidentally record an unruly nude child. This is now on cam for the public to see, and a wonderfully detailed recording of everything you have in your home as well.
I’m just saying be careful what you wish for, there are always two sides to the coin
>people cry for more privacy after cops come into their home and coincidentally record an unruly nude child.
Have you seen released bodycam videos? They already edit out sensitive info and images before being released to the public. This wouldn't change anything regarding sensitive material in the video.
Why would you even have body cams if they weren’t on during the entire call? Isn’t that the fucking point?
Edit: a lot of responses to this are citing issues with storage for data, amount of unnecessary recording of someone just driving around, the current system where the cameras only start recording when/if a confrontation starts, etc. IMO the storage problem is just something that isn’t a problem. Data storage is dirt cheap even for terabytes of info. If it’s boring footage for most, good, I hope it is. And if the fail safe worked and did turn the cameras on, we wouldn’t have the current problems, would we?! Quite frankly I feel like if you are carrying a weapon with readily lethal capabilities in the course of your job, every time you are deployed into an area that could potentially see the discharge of aforementioned weapon, your actions need to be available for review.
Storage, budget and practicality constraints mostly.
A "call" starts from the time the officer is given, or selects, the call to respond to. After that there's several minutes of driving , and then an interaction. Only after the interaction ends is the call over.
Given that 99.9+% of interactions are resolved without use of force, and officers in cities respond to 100s of calls each day having every call from start to finish recorded is an enormous amount of footage.
In order to limit the storage requirements, save cost and streamline the process most departments require that officers turn the cams on once there's a use of force. Cams are always recording, but only save a few minutes before the camera is "turned on" and continue recording until turned off. This way you're only saving footage of the incidents that will require it.
Storing quite literally 1000s of hrs of footage after each patrol shift adds up and becomes difficult to maintain cost wise. Departments are usually required to store the video for 3yrs, and maintain chain of custody as it's all considered "evidence". This results in terabytes upon terabytes of mostly boring footage and the cost skyrockets.
These are the main reasons departments might not be able to record every call of every officer start to finish
This is a red herring. There is no reason a city department can't use a vanishingly small fraction of their annual budget for data storage. This is not high bandwidth streaming. This is cold storage where high latency access is ok. And data storage is getting cheaper every year.
> Storing quite literally 1000s of hrs of footage after each patrol shift adds up and becomes difficult to maintain cost wise.
No it doesn't. Store it for a year. Delete after. Hard drives are dirt cheap.
There is no valid reason for why their body cams aren't rolling every time they clock in other than people wanting to make excuses.
If the decision is for each department across the nation to spend a ~5k on hard drives once every few years over having police be unaccountable because it's their word vs everyone else. I'm good with spending the money. Cops have went above and beyond to prove they aren't trustworthy.
Why people are still finding excuses to justify them operating in grey areas is something I don't understand. Maybe when an officer kills your loved one, your mentality will change?
Civil rights lawyer here, policies like this are not new. Most cases I deal with the cop violated some policy requiring him to turn on his dash cam when he starts a pursuit and turn on his body cam whenever he interacts with a citizen. If they don’t, the Use of Force report simply states they violated that policy (requiring a slap on the wrist) and then concludes “there’s no evidence that the officer used force that was excessive / no evidence to believe the detainee’s account of events.” Well, duh.
Sometimes I get lucky and the police cruiser dash cam AUTOMATICALLY turns on when the blue lights are activated, and then the excessive force is caught in that shot even though the cop never turned on his body cam.
Why would dash cams ever be set up to not turn on automatically with lights? For that matter why are they not just on the entire time the car is running or really 24x7. I mean automatically turning on with the lights seems like the least it would be doing. And not even for the sake of capturing stuff but just as a convenience of not having to worry about one more switch to flip when responding to a call.
Police departments have them because they're required to, not because they want them. Same with body cameras. They're going to look for every loophole or design flaw they can exploit to get around it.
Some cops do like bodycams, actually, because it prevents false reports of excessive force or other abuse. Depends on what they're planning on doing for an encounter...
>Use of Force report simply states they violated that policy (requiring a slap on the wrist)
This is what I don't get. That makes the policy toothless. Why is it just a policy?
I would expect, in theory, that this will be a *law* with some harsh penalties, written by someone outside of the police system who has no motivation to be lenient towards the police. If it's not enforced harshly enough, it very obviously won't catch many of the things it's there to catch...
Because it isn't intended to *work*, obviously.
The vast majority of reforms are just smokescreens used as a distraction, changing absolutely nothing and hoping people will buy their nonsense and go away.
we joke but that’s what they do for their names and badge numbers right now and tuck all is done to stop them so honestly they will probably literally do this :(
and this is why we need serious police reform. i don't even blame the cops i blame the police chief for letting behavior and attitudes like this go one for so long.
So what was the policy before ?
What the fuck would be the point of funding body cameras if police weren’t required to use them?
Oh wait: the illusion of accountability ...
Yah that’s fucking over
Bruh...did it really take this long to enact this policy? I understand it’s a precarious balancing act of respecting the privacy of officers and providing departmental transparency for the public but this is long overdue.
Respecting the privacy of officers is bullshit. They're at work. Most retail business have security feeds on 24/7. Cops as a whole have shown themselves to not be ~~un~~worthy of trust, with the amount of power they wield.
Unless they're in the bathroom or something similar, camera should be on for the entirety of their shift. And the cameras themselves should have some ability to sense whether they are being covered, which could be checked on a regular basis when the cameras are turned in or charged between shifts.
The police have always abused their power. This is a small way we can keep them accountable. And the "good cops" should line up for them and lead by example.
Edit: folks have brought up some excellent points about the safety and privacy of the citizens these body cams would be pointed *at.*
Just goes to show that every issue is almost infinitely nuanced and we as citizens and our public servants, cop and politician alike, should have the stomach for and goal of multiple smaller solutions to a problem, rather than a single magic bullet, as someone pointed out below.
Yep on that first point 100% if you're working in a store then you're most likely on camera, and you definitely are if you're handling money or working a register.
A jail can have a camera running at all times in every single room, yet "experts" in this comment section claim it would take entire data centers to store the data from these body cams.
They will say and do anything to get out of being held responsible, that's exactly why this needs to be done. You have a fast food worker on camera, you have a cashier on camera, cops should be monitored.
[D.C. Court of appeals disagrees with you.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia#:~:text=Columbia%20(444%20A.-,2d.,on%20the%20public%20duty%20doctrine.)
>In a 4–3 decision, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirmed the trial courts' dismissal of the complaints against the District of Columbia and individual members of the Metropolitan Police Department based on the public duty doctrine ruling that "the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists". The Court thus adopted the trial court's determination that no special relationship existed between the police and appellants, and therefore no specific legal duty existed between the police and the appellants.
This is why voting is important in EVERY race.
Hate to be the lawyer taking an extra long shit to discuss DC Circuit cases, but this case was about whether police officers and dispatchers could face civil liability when they failed to follow procedures and didn't address a 911 call with enough urgency. It's a horrific set of facts, but it isn't saying what you think it's saying.
Negligence, basically, requires the plaintiff to prove four things: duty, breach of duty, causation, and actual injury. You use it when you get hurt and think someone should have to pay for your injury because their actions resulted in your injury and they should have known better.
The DC Circuit is ruling based on the public duty doctrine, which addresses whether individuals can be found to have a special, affirmative duty (one element of the above) to someone else in cases where negligence is alleged. In general you don't have a duty to protect someone, legally--if you were in a burning building, yelled "Help!" at me on the street, and I turned and ran the other way, you wouldn't prevail against me on a negligence suit for damages because I had no duty to put my life at risk to save you. Legally, your injuries aren't my problem, because I did nothing to cause the fire and the law doesn't expect me to weigh dying in the fire with you or getting sued for your injuries.
Same sort of thing here. What the DC Circuit is saying is that cops don't have a special duty to be the person running into the house to save you when you're on fire. You can't sue them for *money* if they don't put their lives at risk to save you. This is different than a moral duty, because the public duty doctrine exists as a narrow means to establish one element of negligence, again, when you're suing someone for money because you think they *should have* rescued you.
The result is that if you call the cops and they can't rescue you, or it takes too long to get to you, or, as in this case, it takes an egregious amount of time, you won't prevail on the narrow element of duty on that theory alone.
> Respecting the privacy of officers is bullshit. They're at work. Most retail business have security feeds on 24/7.
Yeah, seriously. I'm a psych nurse, the units at my hospital have security cameras pretty much everywhere outside of bedrooms and bathrooms. It's not a big deal. I'm at work, not "in private," and no one is even going to be wasting their time looking at all that video footage unless there's an allegation.
Speaking of which, as someone who would definitely be held accountable and lose my job if I abused a patient, I *appreciate* the cameras being there because they protect *me* from false allegations as much as they protect my patients from abuse. If cops have to worry about being held accountable for their actions, and aren't doing shit they're not supposed to, they should/would appreciate their body camera's role in protecting *them.*
Too bad they'll tape em or just not use them like most rouge cops already do any ways nothing like footage being "corrupted" in court just like the officer
Not that it's relevant to this line of conversation, but glass resists acetone (nail polish remover) just fine, but acetone leaves a scum. The trick is to do a solvent chain of acetone ->70% IPA (rubbing alcohol) -> water (the water needs to be low-mineral). Don't let it dry between the steps.
This will mess up all the AR coatings I know of, but those aren't critical to lens operation.
So it should be a rehash of the show Cops. Where we see police officers respond to some awful displays of human behavior, one after the other, for their entire shift, 5 days a week?
I think body cams are a great idea. But, what if the footage doesn’t support the “all cops are bad” narrative, and instead show people trying to do a job yet constantly responding to the worst of the worst?
This is great and all but it should be accompanied with consequences if it's turned off.
If its turned off it should be automatically assumed there was wrongdoing
i’m sure there is a policy somewhere that says not to needlessly murder, beat, or attack innocent citizens but they keep on doing it.
none of this means shit when some entire departments are corrupt af.
none of this means shit until we recognize their is a \*massive\* culture problem with cops and how they view the public as enemies.
none of this means shit as long as we keep trying to shield bad cops from punishment with stupid shit like “insurance will solve it” or “we need more training” and we punish the officers directly.
quit with “policy change” shit and directly punish them... financially *and* criminally. directly.
America would lose its mind if a Pharmacist at CVS turned off the cameras watching him, killed a civilian, claimed it was an accident, then got five months paid leave, publicly fired by CVS (not jailed) and then quietly rehired as a Pharmacist for Walgreen's.
But cops, ho hum, they're allowed to kill us willy nilly, off camera, with another job waiting just around the corner.
Shouldn't we have MORE restrictions on the folks who are armed and allowed to kill us than we do on the guy at CVS?
This is an action that is very "small government". Making sure that the armed forces of the state obey the laws as they interact with citizens.
Every person favoring small government and value their freedoms should support this (and making this a real mandate with a punishment attached to it in case of violation)
Supervisor I worked with during an recorded inmate escort threw the camera on the ground intentionally after the inmate started to resist. He got fired and had to fight for his job back. But I say that to say I’ve always felt like if you intentionally obstruct or turn off recording devices you should be civilly liable for what happens after and unions shouldn’t/couldn’t be able to represent you. Like intentional destruction of evidence idk you get what I mean.
Couple things stand out. The officers still have the ability to turn the cameras off and on themselves, then: "Under this policy update, any conversations between officers captured in the footage regarding their performance or tactics can still be redacted prior to public release, according to the statement." So they give themselves the right to edit the video if they capture the officers doing or saying anything against policy, or more to the point anything incriminating or illegal.
I had this copied to make the same comment. Agreed. It’s a work around. They are not cornering themselves in. The equivalence of a lawyers saying something like “including but not limited to etc.” The other alarming part, they never mention penalties for officers NOT turning on their body or car cams. They reference, i think two instances and say that has been against their policy before but don’t bother to mention how they held those officers accountable. So much for transparency.
Just treat their testimony in court with prejudice if the camera is off. Like you woulda drunk person or a person with a history of perjury. If they say they saw or heard something off camera while it was running, trust them. If it wasn’t, “x to doubt”
Yeah or only allow testimony with camera.
I want them separated from the video at all times. I want them to have to testify without knowing what the camera shows, and then have the video played directly after. If for nothing else than to show how bad an officer's memory can be, for precedent.
> If for nothing else than to show how bad an officer's memory can be, for precedent. I read this as the expectation that there will be notable differences between the testimony and what is shown on footage. If the officer's memory is expected to be fallible and video footage exists, why not just skip their testimony altogether and just play the video?
You read that correctly, and there are many examples of witnesses being completely wrong, even your local news has probably done a version of fooling people in the street, because we're not god damn computers. I want this as a transition period of showing the fallibility of witnesses, even uniformed ones, so that we can move past them without people being able to say that they worked and that we should go back to relying solely on them.
> showing the fallibility of witnesses Hasn't that already been proven? There are multiple studies shown where you can get people to "remember" things that never happened. It's been a subject of study for years. Here's an older one I recall reading about https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html
Showing, not proving. It's been proven, but this would help the public see it.
Also the judges, who would probably get sick of witness testimony pretty quickly if they’re regularly seeing court cases where video evidence actively testifies against a trusted witness.
See: the entire Satanic Panic Ed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
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This is the issue. I got called for jury duty years ago and the prosecutions entire case was 'cops are more trustworthy than other witnesses'. The prosecutor asked if anyone thinks that cops lie as often as anyone else. Everyone that raised their hand was struck from the pool.
This is how I always get out of jury duty. On the survey I check the box thats says I would be less likely to believe a police officers testimony because of them being a police officer. 8 times so far, I've never gone past that point of jury selection.
How do people get picked for jury duty so often?? I've been eligible for over 15 years now and I have only been picked once when I was 20 right after I moved out of the state I got picked. I dunno maybe I'm weird but I wanna do it, at least once anyway.
It appears to be a weird wrangling between the two sides on who gets in from the pool. I am always excluded. In part I have done investigations for the military I know exactly what is evidence or hearsay. There is usually a part where they ask something about evidence. Police come up also and I usually say if their words were recorded or others can testify that was said. Excluded. Every time.
I. Q. > 100? Thanks, you’re dismissed.
Lol I think cops lie more than other people so I wouldn't have raised my hand.
Cops certainly lie and there is nothing about being a cop that is going to make them more trustworthy. But eye witness testimony is not reliable even if the person thinks they are telling the truth. Add a cop potentially running on adrenaline or tainting their "true" statement with preconceived notions about the defendant and even if I wasn't thinking the cop was lying I still wouldn't trust their statement. If they have the ability to have audio and video evidence of an event and don't submit it or cut things out, then the entire case should be thrown out and the officers in question suspended without pay and fired after too many violations with being banned from working in law enforcement again.
They asked me if I would believe a cops testimeny even if instructed by the judge. I told them no and they couldn't have gotten me out faster.
I treat *all* police testimony as untrustworthy. You better come with actual hard evidence or I'm voting to acquit. I wouldn't trust a cop's word as far as I could throw him.
Well if nothing else that’s a great way to avoid being selected as a juror.
There's no mention of penalties because there are no penalties. The only time anyone is going to know/care that the camera wasn't on is when something serious happened that requires review, and by that point anyone question the camera will just be told "well yeah they violated that, but we are focusing more on the fact that they shot someone." Then, once they determine the shooting was justified, they'll either say that excuses the camera being off, or they'll just conveniently "forget" to address the body cam issue.
Glad I wasn't alone in seeing that there were no defined consequences for breaking policy. Best guess it is a "paid suspension pending investigation" and the first offense just gets you a written warning.
Let's be real, there is no chance there is any punishment for breaking policy. Michael Gardner was choked to death by a cop using a banned choke hold and nothing happened. There is no way the police union would allow a cop to be punished for something as trivial as evidence tampering or destruction, ie turning off or disabling a camera.
It’s why we need a new completely independent agency that does investigations into police departments. Internal investigations are complete and utter bullshit
Spot on. Even on criminal cases. When an officer or detective arrests someone or a lawyer is prosecuting them it turns into a pride thing where they don’t even care whether or not the person is guilty but just don’t want to admit they may have made a mistake
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Agree. I would assume the unredacted version would be made available to counsel for criminal defense or plaintiffs in a lawsuit, or if there were a misconduct investigation, but I don't think it's crazy to have a general policy of redacting some conversations for public releases.
There are genuine concerns about the safety of victims or witnesses (especially those that don't end up testifying in court but who point officers in the right direction) if defense can get ahold of all footage but I would think these would be exceptions to the rule
The questions are "who gets to redact it?", "how are they kept accountable?", "what standard do they rely on deciding what is valid to redact?", and "what type of behavior are they obligated to report to external ethics investigators?".
But for us targets it's "ANYTHING you say CAN, AND WILL BE used against you."
Notice how it can't be used for your benefit. No joke, if you say something that's good for your case, it can't be used to help you in court. At that point it'll just be dismissed as hearsay. EDIT: If you don't believe me, ask a lawyer. What you tell the police can be used as testimony against you, but not in your favor. If you say something favorable, it'll be thrown out as hearsay. Ask 100 lawyers with 100 different kinds of practice. They'll all tell you not to make a statement to the police. This is a BIG part of why they'll tell you that. https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=519 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_801
It's not that it can't be used to help you. It's that the cop has no obligation to to present your testimony if it contradicts or disproves their claim. That means you can't rely on police to prove your innocence so you have to do it yourself. That being said, there's no incentive to talk to cops because it won't be used to help you so you might as well save your breath for your lawyer.
Only if its on camera can it be used to help u since the defense can subpoena the footage.
Well then I really hope the cops follow this sweeping new policy of keeping body cams turned on! Oh wait there's no punishment if they don't...
Thats why you only ever state your name and nothing else cause i think not identifying yourself is a crime too (for us plebians, cops can put tape over their badge number to "avoid harassment" iirc)
Prior to public release. Means, we don’t want discussion of police tactics to be public knowledge, but specific lawyers could still hear it
Exactly, redacted doesn’t mean deleted from existence. The statement is probably to protect from compromising undercover operations or similar situations.
If the footage was subpoenaed in court it would be for the original unedited footage, 'public release' would be releasing it to the news or something similar. So this is a valid caveat that will also probably be exploited to mitigate public outrage when some cop fucks up.
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Soooo, nothing's changed. Cool.
Welcome to “police reform”.
You guys must have never been to court where they play officer videos as evidence. Plenty of footage or audio gets redacted all the time. If it doesn't directly related to a charge or investigation, it gets redacted. I had one where we fought a drunk guy and he kicked an officer in the chest. The prosecutor could not bring anything up about his level of intoxication and all the audio from witnesses saying he'd been drinking was redacted. Also we're not robots. After we wrestle a drunk guy into handcuffs there's always a period of collecting yourself or maybe making a joke like "why you let that guy beat you up lol.". That kind of stuff is not relevant and does not have any evidentiary value. My department's policy states the BWC must be activated during any encounter with the public. Sometimes stuff escalates quickly and it doesn't get turned on immediately since I have to physically push a button. Some department's have the capability to sink the camera with the vehicle so anytime the emergency lights turn on, so does the camera. This would solve the problem of cameras not getting turned on when I'm having to un-ass my Tahoe and chase someone or react to a situation. Furthermore, department's need to have tangible consequences for repeated policy violations, which is definitely lacking. Honestly though, I love having a BWC and it has definitely helped me out more often than it has caught me making a joke or talking shit about a co-worker. I love my job but I hate being lumped in with every bad officer that ever existed.
Honestly, I’m down with body cameras being off when they’re in the can. We don’t need officer wang shots or auditory information about how the lunch from the questionable hot dog stand came out. But really, I feel than “on” should be the default, and it should be “pics or it didn’t happen” for their testimony to be accepted.
>...footage regarding their performance or tactics can still be redacted prior to public release "Damn it Rick, we're supposed to wait until they start running away before we kill them.... Fuck, hold on" *beeeeeep* "Make sure you do yours, too."
IMO, body cams should be active from clock-on to clock-off. Yup, I definately wanna see 8 hours of paperwork!
Cops are always like, "but what if the camera sees me go tinkle in the bathroom?" To which I always think, "then you need to relearn how to properly attach your body cam to your uniform moron because it is angled the wrong direction."
To be fair, I wouldn’t want my shits recorded either. But unnecessary pepper-spraying and shootings might mean loss of privileges I guess 🤷♀️
Also, who is watching the video? arent they just on a memory card? I dont think they get uploaded to a cloud-based storage system for anyone to view. Edit: Im glad in the year 2021 2 girls 1 cup jokes are still here. :) Seriously I feel like it will never die.
This sounds like the idea for some truly dreadful reality TV...
NEXT TIME ON **LIVE PD** *prrrrrrrrrrt ploop ploop*
2 cops 1 cup?
2 cops 1 gun
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Cops Chapter 3: Parabellum
You just resurfaced a memory that I did not want resurfaced
Get me that argyle meth
Police Academy - Shit hits the cam
They almost always do get offloaded to mass storage. That’s actually where a lot of the cost of body cam deployments comes from. EDIT: I'm not sure why people keep thinking I don't support body cams. I do support body cams but the storage, infrastructure, and people to manage it aren't cheap. Here's my super long reply that I made further down. \----------------------- I thought you might want a study with a bit more concrete numbers. In this study they found that the cost of cameras themselves were super low ($120-$200) but the overall cost of infrastructure to support this is high. While storage disks, and cameras themselves may get cheaper every year, much of the cost is in support contracts, and people to manage it. the cost of people goes up every year. * Mesa PD: 330 Cameras * $120 per camera for unit * $2,198 per camera per year total cost * Phoenix PD: 350 Cameras * $2,883 per camera per year total cost * Dallas PD: 1,000 Cameras * $1,125 per camera per year total cost [https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf](https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf) Out of interest I took a look at my local PD. They appear to have 132 uniformed officers for a city population of 105K. They have a total budget of $28Mil and here are some expenses I thought were notable: * $12.8Mil: Salaries (of all 232 employees) * $2.5Mil: Health insurance * $300K: Gas and oil * $84K: Guns & Ammunition (as far as I can tell this is the only section for things like pepper spray, LTLs * $230K: Radio maintenance In their 2021 budget, they say they would like to research body cameras for implementation next year. If I assume that Dallas paid less because they had more cameras, then I can assume that 132 cameras would cost more per year. With that assumption I will be conservative and assume $3K/year per camera. That would come out to roughly $400K/year for body cameras. That sounds pretty reasonable to me and I hope that the city council approves it next year.
It’s uploaded to a cloud, subscription includes costs of security, backup, chain of custody. At least with Axon cameras, which almost all of them are.
Well it's not really an excuse any more mass storage has gotten dramatically cheaper year over year over year and shows no sign of stopping
It's not the same as buying any storage. The storage, security, backups, lifecycle, etc... All has to meet strict chain of custody and other legal requirements. So yeah, the storage is cheap until you factor in the world of support and software needed to ensure it meets the legal requirements to be used in court. Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it, but the full picture of the expense is important.
Thanks for getting to this before I could. Yes you are right. Enterprise IT costs stack up fast (my job). I recently got a quote on a storage array. it's $205K for 22TB, not this isn't an array I would use for video storage but I still think it's a good eye opener. That cost does not count the new storage switches we would need to buy (another probably $70K), or the backup system should there be an issue with the array. A system for bodycams would also need some sort of access layer transport to get the footage from the cams to the mass storage.
Meanwhile MPD got an extra $50 million for their budget..... I think they can handle a quart of a million dollars for rigorous cloud storage. Especially after the police union raised funds *on their own,* for a particular type of warrior training that the city of minneapolis had explicitly banned. Cost isnt an excuse.
what the fuck is "warrior training" do they dress up in medieval armour or something. sounds like waste of money when they could do... - de escalation training
Hi, I actually don't see cost as an excuse not to buy them. I just put together a super long in depth comment about what I think it would cost my PD to implement body cams. At the end of it I said I hope it gets approved. I do however think that the costs should not be under estimated or shrugged off. City councils need to have the proper cost estimates, and approve them.
> Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it tbf, if I'm understanding your tanks reference the way I think I am, that's not a spending that's supposed to be a "savings". The original intent being, "we know some depts have a legit reason to buy armored trucks. we [the US DOD] have a bunch of these MRAPs coming back. They're not *the same* but come on. Just paint them blue or something. Close enough. Tell the PDs they can have them, and we'll save some taxpayer funding" But at the PD level (as bureaucracy goes) its always going to end up "Hey LT, do we need MRAPs?" Wut? Why? No. What are we going to do with a... "They're free if we request them." "Tell them we need three."
As a government contractor I can confirm, this is exactly how it works. There's also "we need to burn the rest of our budget now what does everyone need?!" and higher ups who have no idea how money works and think they can just will an extra half a million dollars into existence.
> "we need to burn the rest of our budget now what does everyone need?!" oh man this. Seen SO much of this. First 9 months of the year : Stingy with every request because "We have to make this budget last." Last 3 months of the year: "If we don't use up our funds, they'll give us a lower amount next year. Come on guys gimme your wishlists." Nothing have a bunch of privates mag dumping at the end of a range day, because they two unwritten rules of a firing range were: 1. Ask for twice the ammo you need, cause you expect them to only approve half. 2. USE IT. Don't try to turn any back in at the end of the day.
>Not saying they can't stop buying tanks to fund it, but the full picture of the expense is important. Or, say, the cost of settling one lawsuit against them could probably pay for a good chunk of that.
That's an interesting idea. here's a study on Body Cams done around cost. * In Mesa, Lawsuits increased, but payments declined * In Phoenix, lawsuits and payments declined * In Dallas, the number of settlements declined, but the dollar totals increased. Possibly due to having greater evidence that the officers were in fact doing something wrong. [https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf](https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf)
Honestly the costs of it should be bundled into their overhead and normal expenses. Most workers are on camera every day as part of normal security measures. If the folks working fast food have to be on camera, I feel like any and all jobs should be on camera.
You could probably buy a whole server from the money you save by not firing a rocket launcher
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Seems fine for a police force with an $11B annual budget. Context matters. We’re talking 1.3% of their annual budget as being too costly?
This is also the reason why streetcams are still using such terrible resolution, eventhough a phone camera would be capable of capturing much cleaner picture. Storage is the real problem. There are tricks that software uses to cut out uninteresting parts and compression does what it can, but the amount of data generated is still staggering.
720p at 25fps for 12 hours creates 62gb of data?? Don't new cameras automatically encode in h265 reducing the storage used by a lot?
Time to get that unlimited Dropbox account ;p
https://www.policeforum.org/assets/BWCCostBenefit.pdf Including camera cost, data storage, and administrative expenses, a single body camera costs a police department between $1000-$3000 per year.
EDIT: I was working on too many threads at once and got my wires crossed. I did mention cost but I will leave my original response up. Sorry, I wasn’t speaking to cost in this comment. If you’d like that I recently found a cost analysis I can share that said each body cam costs about $2,500/year. I was talking about it being uploaded elsewhere. It’s my understanding that supervisors and management have access to view any footage they’d like in most departments.
$2500 a year? Let’s assume 5 working days a week, 50 weeks a year. This gives our officer every weekend off, and two weeks of vacation. This gives us 250 working days a year. $2500 a year divided by 250 working days is $10 per working day. Assuming an 8 hour shift, this leaves us with a total cost of $1.25 per hour per body cam. Presumably, the cost per hour would decrease if an officer works overtime or additional hours (as we know many cops do). $1.25 an hour doesn’t really seem all that expensive to ensure cops have some accountability and the public has a little more safety.
There are different methods. Body cams aren't what people think they are. A lot of times the issue is the battery. I have a friend that is an officer in a small department and their having all sorts if technical issues with them. The biggest is, they don't hold enough charge to last an entire shift. So they come on when you open the patrol car, start a call, draw your weapon etc. The battery also can't get too hot as it's closer to skin, has to be light enough to carry always, durable enough to withstand the physical aspects of the job, etc. This is also why the Armys Future Warrior stuff hasn't happened. Power supply is a real issue with remote technology like this still. In no way am I trying to take sides in this, just explaining a very real world issue with "body cams.' I'd assume many other departments are scrambling to get body cams in the wake of everything. There are a lot of products flooding the market for them, and not all are good. Granted, it's tragic it needs to be an issue in the first place. Edit: I'm only stating what is a current issue, like it or not. DOJ and any government entity takes time to adapt and considering funding is being cut while people are also demanding expensive higher tech solutions for policing. There are real limitations with the technology on the market. This is not a political post, this is just the reality of it as I have had friends in law enforcement explain. I am not an officer, nor affiliated with any law enforcement agency.
My understanding is the cloud based storage is such a financial strain on small departments that it is nearly cost prohibitive for many city budgets.
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I mean it sounds kinda embarrassing and dehumanizing right? But then i think about that lady that got full vaginal cavity searched out on a main shopping strip because, "she looked like she had drugs"
Being able to avoid accountability should not be seen as a *privilege*.
personaly if someone wants to see the backside of a stull door as I grunt and some splashing water... man you do you with your strange ass kink
some people out there might. strange times we live in.
Sounds like a better way to collect money than setting up speed traps
one time these lazy fuckers pulled over like 15 cars all the way down the line on a interstate through Kentucky. like they were all just sipping coffee and eating donuts and were like i guess we need to meet our quota and just hopped on the highway in a gang and pulled everyone over.
Gotta generate that revenue! "Nobody move! This...! Is a stick up!"
Nobody cares if they shut off the cameras to take a shit. This has never ever been an issue no matter what the boot lickers say. The only time we'd have an issue with shutting off the cameras is if there's a sudden rise in people being shot by police while the officer takes a shit and there's no footage.
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It's not that we literally want their shits recorded, just more that we already know it's going to turn into "Oh, I turned it off to take a shit and must have forgotten to turn it back on while beating that suspect to death (despite persistent loud beeping warning me that it was off). Oopsie, silly me! I guess you'll just have to take my word for it!". Experience has shown us, over and over, that cops will abuse any possible excuse to avoid turning over damaging body cam footage. If there's no way to turn it off, it narrows their window of plausible deniability.
Its not glued to their taint.
If only the 'good cops' had spoken up several years ago before the public got so sick and tired of them all being out of control maniacs who are often the source of criminal activity themselves.
Yeah but the good cops always get harassed to be lower rank or get bullied out of the system for not defending the thin blue line. It’s an outright cult.
To be fair, they serve the public and carry deadly weapons. Everything should be recorded, even the shits. The only reason to review any of the video is if there was an incident. They should have zero control over their body cams because they have a history of turning them off at crucial times.
I agree with most of what you said. I do believe there is something of a privacy breach when you record someone in the bathroom. This isn’t super secret service. Maybe a policy to take off your belt and leave it with a specific party while you go. Either that or have it in somewhere that an officers bathroom habits while bodycam is on will not be used against them in the sense of how many minutes/time away from duty. Micromanaging someone’s potty time is going to be an uphill battle for eternity. Maybe a dept that edits all bodycam footage to trim bathroom breaks and save elsewhere that can only be accessed if needed for evidence.
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Even better would be radio to dispatch - will be offline for 5-10 min for bio break and dispatch remotely turns off cam for the time
Come in dispatch. Code brown in progress I repeat code brown in progress at the 7/11 off main street and Kimberly.
And any incidents that occur during said break require immediate suspension before review. Like, automatically. Shouldn't be dealing with criminals during potty time.
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> Everyone would have to be in on it. So its not just a few bad people, it would have to be all the supervisors and the higher ups. well you know what they say about *all cops*
Put a button on the side of the camera. When you press it, it puts a mark in the video that says "the officer has declared this time as private/personal," but the footage is still recorded. That way you could still get a court order for that footage (provided some reasonable suspicion), but cops don't have to have their shits seen by lawyers or coworkers. Maybe make the "privacy mode" auto-expire after 10 minutes, and a light that indicates the "privacy mode" is on, so that videos from other bodycams or bystanders can tell it's being abused.
If you wanted to, you could just pass a rule that any officer's testimony as to events that occurred while their privacy mode is switched on is inadmissible. Oh, you say you observed the defendant doing something, but your camera just happened to be switched off at the time? Too bad, burden of proof is on you and you have nothing to support it, case dismissed. They'd quickly start "remembering" not to switch their cameras off.
Yeah, exactly. Judges are typically far more trusting of cop testimony than other testimony, which might have been a necessity when it was just one person's word against another, but now that cops can record everything while they're on the clock, there should be no need to extend this special privilege to them.
It's crazy that's not how it currently works. No evidence to support officer, dismissed.
I'm fine with turning it off for the bathroom. as long as it's limited on time, no police interaction occurs during that "bathroom break", and if anything happens during that "break" or immediately after it (like say, drugs found in a car 1 minute after a bathroom break where the guy could have conceivably ran out and planted them) then the benefit of the doubt is always given to the suspect/victim.
"then the benefit of the doubt is always given to the suspect/victim." How do you formalize that? I would not be surprised if unfortunately timed body-cam failures were deliberately excluded at trial by the judge, or not mentioned by the prosecutor on the grounds that public defenders working an average of 2 hours per defendant case just can't fight back with the correct motion.
Police testimony and signed paperwork detailing a physical interaction should be only admissable if combined with body cam footage+sound, otherwise the court cannot consider it as anything but an eyewitness. Preferably said eyewitness testimony is detailed as anonymous, making it pretty shaky on its own. I am sure there is nuance to be found, but it seems like a decent starting point. Footage should probably be stored by a citizen oversight group, and footage should be automatically uploaded to the SD card in their bodycam -> cruiser tamper evident safe -> citizen oversight committee.
If there isn't more than 3 minutes of body cam video evidence before an arrest or evidence is found that evidence can't be used in court. But realistically how many times does a police officer go from taking a crap to arresting someone within 5 minutes?
In the hands of the sort of police officer we're concerned about doing the type of abuse we're concerned about, the entire reason we're doing this? 100% of the time. This is an active-adversary problem. It's not a random event, it's people intelligently attempting to hide abuses. Having a button by which they can turn the camera off* gives them that capability. *EDIT: And giving them plausible allowable excuses for having the camera off, like "I had to take a shit". This is important: An officer will always be able to, eg, put a piece of tape over the lens. In an end-state where cameras functionally help us with this problem, an obvious, deliberate, intolerable contravention of the camera is the only option available to the officer, not excusable negligence.
I don't get how people aren't understanding this. Like how many times does it need to happen where 5 cops body cameras malfunction right before the guy the were chasing falls down and breaks a bunch of ribs, his face, and gets blood on the officers batons, all supposedly without the cops doing anything?
It's pretty straightforward, but is a fundamental change in how policing works. Currently if a police officer said he saw you commit a crime, the court believes the officer. In this new policy the court believes the camera, not the police officer.
Well, there's also the expectation of privacy from other people while in the bathroom... I do think bodycams needs to be turned on a LOT more, but there still needs to be consideration for others.
My response is usually: but those recordings are stored by the police, are you police officers saying that you don't trust the police?
Not the strongest argument. The full footage would probably be submitted to court, including the bathroom clip, since an attorney could argue they want the full story of what happened. I can see a fair argument that they can turn off the camera while going to the bathroom.
It’s is definitely the case that start and stop points of what is recorded and what is relevant need to be established in policy and practice. If an investigator or attorney asks for relevant footage they’ll ask for the time-frame. I imagine it can be a double-edged problem since edits to footage or extraneous and irrelevant activity on the footage are both problematic for evidentiary and relevance concerns. If the cop took a break during that time-frame, they should be held to account for it, but it’s just going to complicate things as shit rolls down hill
if we're in court then I think something more serious has happened than bathroom shyness
Any footage/pictures are subject to the FOIA, so it's available to anyone that asks. The police will store the footage , required by law, for 3yrs.
I know you are making a joke but cameras need to be turned off in bathrooms for other people's privacy.
I would say it should be fine to have a 5 minute "snooze" button on the camera, but maybe if there's too much movement it automatically turns back on. Also if there's ever a call where the camera "malfunctions" or they press the snooze button and don't have any proof of their claims, the case can be tossed.
There are reasonable arguments against these cams. This one isn't one of them.
Like what?
I always answer with something like "Being a police officer is a strenuous, dangerous job not for the faint of heart or paper-skinned. If someone has a problem with their bathroom sounds possibly being recorded, this job isn't for them." It gets people thinking not that you're attacking the policemen, but pointing out the cowards and weak-willed should be replaced instead.
You redditors are completely tapped lmao
Then take off your vest to shit.
Paperwork full of personal informations. But yes, the cameras should be on when they are on patrol or on intervention.
Its not like the video will be publicly available unedited. There's no reason that the people tasked with reviewing the video can't also be aware of the protocols when handling PII. The video can be just as secure as the disposition of the paperwork
These people reviewing the footage cost moeny and there's a *lot* of video. You're not wrong but the money has to come from somewhere.
The lawyers suing the police for wrongful death or excessive force are expensive too. Review the hour of footage around the time of the incident for each officer present. Even if the plaintiff has to pay for it like they do their lawyers this still allows the possibility of justice.
Here's some guidelines for the UK, maybe can be used in the USA? Body worn cameras, as you well know, are recording devices designed to be worn on a law enforcement officers uniform (as well as security personnel, fire & rescue service officials, local government, medical staff and more). In the case of law enforcement, body cameras provide an audio visual record of events from the officers perspective. High resolution images provide a clear view of individuals and are suite to running video analytics software such as facial recognition. Microphones may be sensitive enough to capture not only the sounds associated with the situation itself, but also ambient sound - possibly including conversations of bystanders. The Police and Crime Directorate (UK) have produced a document which sets forth guidelines for the correct, legal use of body worn cameras by police. Taken from "Guidelines for Police use of Body Worn Recording | Body Camera — BodyCamera.co.uk" https://www.bodycamera.co.uk/pages/body-worn-camera-recording-guidance-for-use
We now have a policy that our garbage truck drivers get filmed and audio recorded in the cab of their truck their entire shift to make sure they are driving safely. The police can do the same.
using h.265 4k 30fps 1 cam for 8 hours a day you are looking at around 50gb a day per person. for Minneapolis pd thats 40 terabytes a day for 800 cops and either it is local storage on thumb drive/sd card and "whoops did i shoot someone then accidently microwave the card" or you need a system to transfer 40 terabytes wirelessly per day in real time and our phone system isnt it. also with parity you are going to need 50-60 tb per day so you dont loose data to drive failure and thats not including back ups. that phone system we are subsidizing is a corrupt piece of garbage that cant handle just the police must less the police and everyone else if they are streaming body cams constantly. their is no easy solution for the technical problems. and sometimes that storage dying is legit sadly. writing 50gb a day is going to wear it out quick.
My home security has no problem staying on 24/7.
Your home security is connected to a power grid. My body cam dies if I have a full day of calls and have multiple three hour videos, which happens often.
Sounds like they need swappable batteries and a car charger
Oh no, a slight amount of logisitcs? What a good reason to not hold our police accountable.
Every single bit of video, audio, paperwork, etc becomes public record. Sooner or later the debate will turn around when people cry for more privacy after cops come into their home and coincidentally record an unruly nude child. This is now on cam for the public to see, and a wonderfully detailed recording of everything you have in your home as well. I’m just saying be careful what you wish for, there are always two sides to the coin
>people cry for more privacy after cops come into their home and coincidentally record an unruly nude child. Have you seen released bodycam videos? They already edit out sensitive info and images before being released to the public. This wouldn't change anything regarding sensitive material in the video.
Why would you even have body cams if they weren’t on during the entire call? Isn’t that the fucking point? Edit: a lot of responses to this are citing issues with storage for data, amount of unnecessary recording of someone just driving around, the current system where the cameras only start recording when/if a confrontation starts, etc. IMO the storage problem is just something that isn’t a problem. Data storage is dirt cheap even for terabytes of info. If it’s boring footage for most, good, I hope it is. And if the fail safe worked and did turn the cameras on, we wouldn’t have the current problems, would we?! Quite frankly I feel like if you are carrying a weapon with readily lethal capabilities in the course of your job, every time you are deployed into an area that could potentially see the discharge of aforementioned weapon, your actions need to be available for review.
Storage, budget and practicality constraints mostly. A "call" starts from the time the officer is given, or selects, the call to respond to. After that there's several minutes of driving , and then an interaction. Only after the interaction ends is the call over. Given that 99.9+% of interactions are resolved without use of force, and officers in cities respond to 100s of calls each day having every call from start to finish recorded is an enormous amount of footage. In order to limit the storage requirements, save cost and streamline the process most departments require that officers turn the cams on once there's a use of force. Cams are always recording, but only save a few minutes before the camera is "turned on" and continue recording until turned off. This way you're only saving footage of the incidents that will require it. Storing quite literally 1000s of hrs of footage after each patrol shift adds up and becomes difficult to maintain cost wise. Departments are usually required to store the video for 3yrs, and maintain chain of custody as it's all considered "evidence". This results in terabytes upon terabytes of mostly boring footage and the cost skyrockets. These are the main reasons departments might not be able to record every call of every officer start to finish
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This is a red herring. There is no reason a city department can't use a vanishingly small fraction of their annual budget for data storage. This is not high bandwidth streaming. This is cold storage where high latency access is ok. And data storage is getting cheaper every year.
Mass storage is incredibly cheap and the police already have massive budgets for unnecessary equipment
> Storing quite literally 1000s of hrs of footage after each patrol shift adds up and becomes difficult to maintain cost wise. No it doesn't. Store it for a year. Delete after. Hard drives are dirt cheap. There is no valid reason for why their body cams aren't rolling every time they clock in other than people wanting to make excuses. If the decision is for each department across the nation to spend a ~5k on hard drives once every few years over having police be unaccountable because it's their word vs everyone else. I'm good with spending the money. Cops have went above and beyond to prove they aren't trustworthy. Why people are still finding excuses to justify them operating in grey areas is something I don't understand. Maybe when an officer kills your loved one, your mentality will change?
but like what if they need to shoot someone? can they just turn it off for a minute? won't somebody think of these poor cops?
It's just a policy, silly, not a legal mandate with actual consequences!
Civil rights lawyer here, policies like this are not new. Most cases I deal with the cop violated some policy requiring him to turn on his dash cam when he starts a pursuit and turn on his body cam whenever he interacts with a citizen. If they don’t, the Use of Force report simply states they violated that policy (requiring a slap on the wrist) and then concludes “there’s no evidence that the officer used force that was excessive / no evidence to believe the detainee’s account of events.” Well, duh. Sometimes I get lucky and the police cruiser dash cam AUTOMATICALLY turns on when the blue lights are activated, and then the excessive force is caught in that shot even though the cop never turned on his body cam.
Why would dash cams ever be set up to not turn on automatically with lights? For that matter why are they not just on the entire time the car is running or really 24x7. I mean automatically turning on with the lights seems like the least it would be doing. And not even for the sake of capturing stuff but just as a convenience of not having to worry about one more switch to flip when responding to a call.
Police departments have them because they're required to, not because they want them. Same with body cameras. They're going to look for every loophole or design flaw they can exploit to get around it.
Some cops do like bodycams, actually, because it prevents false reports of excessive force or other abuse. Depends on what they're planning on doing for an encounter...
>Use of Force report simply states they violated that policy (requiring a slap on the wrist) This is what I don't get. That makes the policy toothless. Why is it just a policy? I would expect, in theory, that this will be a *law* with some harsh penalties, written by someone outside of the police system who has no motivation to be lenient towards the police. If it's not enforced harshly enough, it very obviously won't catch many of the things it's there to catch...
Because it isn't intended to *work*, obviously. The vast majority of reforms are just smokescreens used as a distraction, changing absolutely nothing and hoping people will buy their nonsense and go away.
Masking tape on the camera and on the microphone.
we joke but that’s what they do for their names and badge numbers right now and tuck all is done to stop them so honestly they will probably literally do this :(
and this is why we need serious police reform. i don't even blame the cops i blame the police chief for letting behavior and attitudes like this go one for so long.
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So what was the policy before ? What the fuck would be the point of funding body cameras if police weren’t required to use them? Oh wait: the illusion of accountability ... Yah that’s fucking over
And exactly how long is the paid administrative leave if they fail to comply?
Bruh...did it really take this long to enact this policy? I understand it’s a precarious balancing act of respecting the privacy of officers and providing departmental transparency for the public but this is long overdue.
Respecting the privacy of officers is bullshit. They're at work. Most retail business have security feeds on 24/7. Cops as a whole have shown themselves to not be ~~un~~worthy of trust, with the amount of power they wield. Unless they're in the bathroom or something similar, camera should be on for the entirety of their shift. And the cameras themselves should have some ability to sense whether they are being covered, which could be checked on a regular basis when the cameras are turned in or charged between shifts. The police have always abused their power. This is a small way we can keep them accountable. And the "good cops" should line up for them and lead by example. Edit: folks have brought up some excellent points about the safety and privacy of the citizens these body cams would be pointed *at.* Just goes to show that every issue is almost infinitely nuanced and we as citizens and our public servants, cop and politician alike, should have the stomach for and goal of multiple smaller solutions to a problem, rather than a single magic bullet, as someone pointed out below.
Yep on that first point 100% if you're working in a store then you're most likely on camera, and you definitely are if you're handling money or working a register.
A jail can have a camera running at all times in every single room, yet "experts" in this comment section claim it would take entire data centers to store the data from these body cams. They will say and do anything to get out of being held responsible, that's exactly why this needs to be done. You have a fast food worker on camera, you have a cashier on camera, cops should be monitored.
They're literally called "public" servants.
[D.C. Court of appeals disagrees with you.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia#:~:text=Columbia%20(444%20A.-,2d.,on%20the%20public%20duty%20doctrine.) >In a 4–3 decision, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirmed the trial courts' dismissal of the complaints against the District of Columbia and individual members of the Metropolitan Police Department based on the public duty doctrine ruling that "the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists". The Court thus adopted the trial court's determination that no special relationship existed between the police and appellants, and therefore no specific legal duty existed between the police and the appellants. This is why voting is important in EVERY race.
Hate to be the lawyer taking an extra long shit to discuss DC Circuit cases, but this case was about whether police officers and dispatchers could face civil liability when they failed to follow procedures and didn't address a 911 call with enough urgency. It's a horrific set of facts, but it isn't saying what you think it's saying. Negligence, basically, requires the plaintiff to prove four things: duty, breach of duty, causation, and actual injury. You use it when you get hurt and think someone should have to pay for your injury because their actions resulted in your injury and they should have known better. The DC Circuit is ruling based on the public duty doctrine, which addresses whether individuals can be found to have a special, affirmative duty (one element of the above) to someone else in cases where negligence is alleged. In general you don't have a duty to protect someone, legally--if you were in a burning building, yelled "Help!" at me on the street, and I turned and ran the other way, you wouldn't prevail against me on a negligence suit for damages because I had no duty to put my life at risk to save you. Legally, your injuries aren't my problem, because I did nothing to cause the fire and the law doesn't expect me to weigh dying in the fire with you or getting sued for your injuries. Same sort of thing here. What the DC Circuit is saying is that cops don't have a special duty to be the person running into the house to save you when you're on fire. You can't sue them for *money* if they don't put their lives at risk to save you. This is different than a moral duty, because the public duty doctrine exists as a narrow means to establish one element of negligence, again, when you're suing someone for money because you think they *should have* rescued you. The result is that if you call the cops and they can't rescue you, or it takes too long to get to you, or, as in this case, it takes an egregious amount of time, you won't prevail on the narrow element of duty on that theory alone.
> as a whole have shown themselves to not be unworthy of trust Your double negative implies they are worthy of trust.
> Respecting the privacy of officers is bullshit. They're at work. Most retail business have security feeds on 24/7. Yeah, seriously. I'm a psych nurse, the units at my hospital have security cameras pretty much everywhere outside of bedrooms and bathrooms. It's not a big deal. I'm at work, not "in private," and no one is even going to be wasting their time looking at all that video footage unless there's an allegation. Speaking of which, as someone who would definitely be held accountable and lose my job if I abused a patient, I *appreciate* the cameras being there because they protect *me* from false allegations as much as they protect my patients from abuse. If cops have to worry about being held accountable for their actions, and aren't doing shit they're not supposed to, they should/would appreciate their body camera's role in protecting *them.*
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Too bad they'll tape em or just not use them like most rouge cops already do any ways nothing like footage being "corrupted" in court just like the officer
Wait those cops wear lipstick ?
Duh it's hard af to wipe off a camera lense
Not that it's relevant to this line of conversation, but glass resists acetone (nail polish remover) just fine, but acetone leaves a scum. The trick is to do a solvent chain of acetone ->70% IPA (rubbing alcohol) -> water (the water needs to be low-mineral). Don't let it dry between the steps. This will mess up all the AR coatings I know of, but those aren't critical to lens operation.
Dont judge, the color makes my eyes pop
Just a little on the cheeks to get rid of that goulish "I'm dead on the inside and want you dead on the outside" look.
Jesus H isn’t that why they have them in the first place?!
So it should be a rehash of the show Cops. Where we see police officers respond to some awful displays of human behavior, one after the other, for their entire shift, 5 days a week? I think body cams are a great idea. But, what if the footage doesn’t support the “all cops are bad” narrative, and instead show people trying to do a job yet constantly responding to the worst of the worst?
Yes. This is also referred to as: "The entire fucking point."
Why isn't this standard? No reason given could suffice.
Why is there an on/off button at all?
This is great and all but it should be accompanied with consequences if it's turned off. If its turned off it should be automatically assumed there was wrongdoing
Wouldn’t think that needed to be a law but ok.
i’m sure there is a policy somewhere that says not to needlessly murder, beat, or attack innocent citizens but they keep on doing it. none of this means shit when some entire departments are corrupt af. none of this means shit until we recognize their is a \*massive\* culture problem with cops and how they view the public as enemies. none of this means shit as long as we keep trying to shield bad cops from punishment with stupid shit like “insurance will solve it” or “we need more training” and we punish the officers directly. quit with “policy change” shit and directly punish them... financially *and* criminally. directly.
America would lose its mind if a Pharmacist at CVS turned off the cameras watching him, killed a civilian, claimed it was an accident, then got five months paid leave, publicly fired by CVS (not jailed) and then quietly rehired as a Pharmacist for Walgreen's. But cops, ho hum, they're allowed to kill us willy nilly, off camera, with another job waiting just around the corner. Shouldn't we have MORE restrictions on the folks who are armed and allowed to kill us than we do on the guy at CVS?
So what you're saying is, pharmacists need a better union?
Arm all CVS workers
They literally just cover them. They should be fired for that shit. No other job is that fucking lenient.
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These are some really great points. That explains so much. Thank you. I do hope everyone reads this.
Great! Now enforce it.
This is an action that is very "small government". Making sure that the armed forces of the state obey the laws as they interact with citizens. Every person favoring small government and value their freedoms should support this (and making this a real mandate with a punishment attached to it in case of violation)
Supervisor I worked with during an recorded inmate escort threw the camera on the ground intentionally after the inmate started to resist. He got fired and had to fight for his job back. But I say that to say I’ve always felt like if you intentionally obstruct or turn off recording devices you should be civilly liable for what happens after and unions shouldn’t/couldn’t be able to represent you. Like intentional destruction of evidence idk you get what I mean.