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I'm a little surprised that in the article, and in the comments here, there's such a presumption of guilt on the part of the police. I understand that this is

I'm a little surprised that in the article, and in the comments here, there's such a presumption of guilt on the part of the police. I understand that this is a controversial topic in the US, probably moreso than elsewhere, and for very important reasons, but is it really impartial for the study, the article, or the comments here to draw the conclusion that police were "better behaved" because they were being filmed? Maybe the public were better behaved when they being filmed. Maybe the police were, in some cases, behaving as they normally do but the public were less inclined to raise complaints that may have been spurious as they knew there was evidence of the actual exchange. I don't doubt that behaviour of individual officers is a factor and was likely affected in a positive way here, but I'm deeply skeptical that a 93% drop in complaints is solely down to bad police officers playing nice for the cameras. The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely?

Aaargh20318 10y ago
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? No, the police should be held to a higher standard. They are not citizens when they are out on patrol, they are representatives of the government. IMHO police officers should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  I don't think anyone should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
  - Aaargh20318 10y ago
    They should be able to justify every single action they perform while on duty anyway, and it should be easy with a bodycam. I see no problem in presumption of guilt for officers on duty. At the very least it'll give them incentive to actually wear the cam.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      I am not disagreeing that police officers should be held to a higher standard than others (with great power comes great responsibility), but nobody should ever be presumed guilty and be left having to prove their innocence.
      - Aaargh20318 10y ago
        No one is forcing you to become a police officer. If you want special privileges (e.g. allowed to use deadly force) then you also get special responsibilities.
        cujo 10y ago
        You're dodging the issue. Assuming the officer is guilty outright, seem dangerous honestly.
        beachstartup 10y ago
        haha dude. he's taking the position because it's extreme. it's called moving the overton window. political talk taken at face value is almost worthless. you can't literally argue with people like this on the internet.
        Aaargh20318 10y ago
        Why would it be dangerous ? As I said, that officer needs to account for all his actions during working hours anyway, so there should never be a problem proving his/her innocence. Or to put it another way: if an officer has, say an hour, on a working day in which (s)he can't account for his/her whereabouts and actions, wouldn't that be a good reason to suspect and investigate that officer ? What was he/she doing in that time, why did he/she feel the need to drop 'off the grid' for an hour ? If they have nothing to hide, then why would it be a problem ?
        ptaipale 10y ago
        Making the police officer career more risky by imposing arbitrary sanctions in case of bad luck isn't going to improve your chances of recruiting good police officers. Yes, there are special responsibilities, but due process is important. If it's not happening, make that process work. Your approach is similar to "there is too much crime, let's make more laws so that more things are criminal".
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  There is, in general, no way to prove you're innocent.
- pc86 10y ago
  Unfortunately your opinion runs contrary to basic jurisprudence.
richmarr 10y ago
> ...there's such a presumption of guilt There's a long catalogue of evidence that the police have been insitutionally racist (and other issues). Specifically in the UK, but I suspect the US has a similar catalogue of evidence. > Maybe the public... The conclusion drawn seems like the most realistic explanation. Your alternatives don't seem credible considering the change also occurred when police weren't wearing cameras. [Edit: "have been" rather than "are" insitutionally racist, evidence is in the past and will hopefully stay that way)
- the-dude 10y ago
  Do you mean not investigating rape rings because of fear of being called racist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
  - colemickens 10y ago
    Oh, a "counter" incident. Institutional racism is officially over!
    - the-dude 10y ago
      It is not over, what I pointed at IS racism. This is not an incident however, this is happening all over Europe. Police are hesitant to reveal real rates of crime, Dutch police advising victims not to press charges because the Northern-African suspects are known to make your life miserable. Calling statistical profiling racial profiling instead etc.
      - lukeschlather 10y ago
        Ethnic profiling is bunk. It kind of works in areas like Israel, where there is literally a war on and the goal of profiling is not to determine criminality, but which side of the war you are on. If you're trying to determine criminality, ethnic profiling doesn't work. It's been proven time and again. It's amazing that we're still having this debate 70 years after the West shed eugenics.
rndgermandude 10y ago
Sure, the presumption of innocence is a two-way street, but it does not always work these days for either party. But to be fair, the article and the original paper discuss all your points as well. There is no "blame everything on the police" attitude there. And body cameras help with all of those: They can substantiate claims against misbehaving police officers, but they can also prove their innocence. Also, it may very well be that citizens, when aware of the cameras, are less confrontational and ill-behaving towards officers, not just officers on best behavior. And if an officer OR a citizen behaves badly, with body cameras you get instant video proof, which helps the victim no matter if the victim was the citizen OR the police officer.
mhuffman 10y ago
Spoken like a person who has had limited interaction with police officers.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behaviour on the part of police. Conversely - cops, as a normal part of doing their jobs have to deal with drunk, crazy, wild and violent people quite often. I'm not making a comment about the article, but about the 'presumption of innocence'. I think 'bad cops' are probably an issue of culture within specific policing stations and groups.
  - mhuffman 10y ago
    > I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behavior on the part of police. Well that is just amazing to be honest. I have LEO in the family and they all did personality 180s after joining. They converted to an "us vs them" mentality. All of there coworkers were identical. I am not saying that they ran around being assholes to everyone, but they literally started thing less of "others". Every person in the community is a criminal now, they just haven't been caught. You can even see it in action. If you have ever came across a person in the grocery store wearing a high-and-tight and they looked at you with bafflement as to why you did not immediately get out of their way when they were passing -- that was an off-duty cop. BTW, the power-trip doesn't just apply to cops, if you know any correctional officers, you will see the same phenomena. This power-to-bad-behavior conversion isn't just some anecdotal stories, it is well-known in repeated physiology studies.[1] You can see it in their personal lives as well.[2][3] Add to us-vs-them mentality and inflated sense of power a below average IQ (PDF page 92), and you have what we have today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment [2] http://womenandpolicing.com/violencefs.asp http://womenandpolicing.com/violencefs.asp [3] http://www.milestonegroupnj.com/?page_id=348 http://www.milestonegroupnj.com/?page_id=348 [4] http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
    - 10y ago
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? Why? Presumption of innocence is not a feature of any normal human relationships; it's a special restriction we place on the way the government relates to us. What is the benefit of extending the presumption back to the government? The police are allowed to take your money, rough you up, or kill you if they choose. We can't do that to them.
- jshevek 10y ago
  Among decent, rational people the presumption of innocence is a function of their normal human relationships. There is nothing special about assuming someone is innocent until sufficient evidence is presented.
wnoise 10y ago
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? The presumption of innocence is a legal standard to partially offset the immense might of the state. The prosecutors should need to do a very good job establishing that you actually did something before they can put you in a cage. When it's people talking about statistical measures that don't directly disproportionately impact any given person, no, it doesn't.
- hueving 10y ago
  Did you even read the whole comment you replied to? The op didn't say the statistics were wrong, he/she just pointed out that they could easily be explained by either side of the confrontation behaving better in the presence of a camera. Which one behaves better is not covered by the stats.
  - wnoise 10y ago
    Of course I did. And presuming one explanation for the stats is more likely than another because of background knowledge is not unreasonable. I'd go edit in "interpretation of", but it's too late to edit.
solipsism 10y ago
I'm deeply skeptical that a 93% drop in complaints is solely down to bad police officers playing nice for the cameras. This is easy enough to show. And it is the most obvious and natural conclusion. Your skepticism is fine, but I'm confused why you can't understand my lack of it. In my experience cops are trying to get away with anything they can. The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely Nonsense! Being a police officer is not a right. I don't have a "presumption of innocence" regarding my job. I have to actively prove I'm doing it well. Same goes for cops.
JshWright 10y ago
> Maybe the public were better behaved when they being filmed. This is very much the case. I'm a paramedic, and the police agency in the area got body cameras a few years back. It is extremely common (in my first-hand experience) for folks who have been treated completely respectfully to threaten a complaint. Once it's pointed out the whole incident was on camera, it's amazing how often they drop it right there... I have very serious concerns about policing in this country. I think they are trained to jump to lethal force far too quickly, and the militarization we have seen over the past decades has led to an 'us vs them' mentality for many officers. But you're absolutely right that a large chunk of the drop in complaints is almost certainly folks who don't bother pressing an issue once they find out there is video evidence of what happened.
- balfirevic 10y ago
  That is not at all obvious. There is a large difference in relative power between a citizen and police officer compared to citizen and paramedic. Due to this, I would expect much fewer frivolous complaints against policemen. Now, I do not mean to write this as a proof that there were no frivolous complaints against police, only that you cannot derive any conclusions from number of such complaints against paramedics.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    I'm not talking about paramedics wearing cameras (that would be a HIPAA nightmare...). I'm sharing my personal experience from observing a large number of LEO/citizen interactions (cops and paramedics end up on the same scenes quite frequently)
    - balfirevic 10y ago
      Thanks for the clarification, I thought you were talking about complaints towards paramedics.
- HaloZero 10y ago
  Bu then how does the fact that the drop is on officers with cameras and officers who don't have cameras? The spurious complaints would continue on officers who don't wear them.
headmelted 10y ago
EDIT: when they were being filmed.
whack 10y ago
The article explicitly addresses this question and presents very compelling evidence that the video cameras affect police behavior more so than civilian behavior. Against all expectations, there was no significant difference in complaints between officers wearing cameras that week and those going without. Strange, right? It seems logical to expect that when the camera was actually present, it would act, as intended, as an impartial witness, cooling heads on both sides of an encounter. But complaints dropped even when officers weren’t using the cameras. “It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets — changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” explained the study’s lead author, Barak Ariel, in a Cambridge news release. “With a complaints reduction of nearly 100 percent across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives, to be honest.” The researchers dub this effect “contagious accountability” — learning to do the right thing even when no one is watching.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras. Even the police themselves don't make the distinction when they are the ones wearing it. Why would the public make a distinction when even the one person who should know, can't?
  - whack 10y ago
    You're assuming that the civilians are acting under the assumption that the police are wearing body cameras. But why would you assume this? Most police nationwide do not wear body cameras. For most of recent history, the police in those districts did not wear body cameras. When the study was started, obviously the police themselves knew they were wearing cameras, and hence, would have acted differently because they know they were being watched. But the vast majority of civilians do not follow local-police-news closely enough to assume that the police are wearing body cameras.
  - mbillie1 10y ago
    > The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras. I don't see how it assumes that at all. I think the gist is that police behave in a way that produces less complaints when they are conscious that their actions are being recorded.
ThomPete 10y ago
I am pretty sure that with the police there is 100% knowledge about them wearing a camera, I don't believe the same applies for the public.
nerdponx 10y ago
My guess was that it was due to fewer people filing frivolous complaints, knowing that there'd be video evidence.
- basseq 10y ago
  Presuming departments track complaint resolution outcomes, we should see the rate of "legitimate" cases go up. E.g., if 100 cases were filed, 50 frivolous, and the officer in question was sanctioned in 10 cases, that's a 10% rate. If the number of frivolous cases drops to 0, the "sanction" rate should double to 20%.
weberc2 10y ago
I share your surprise. I'm disappointed in the comments here; usually this is where I come to find level-headed conversations based on data and evidence. Instead the top comments are all unsupported and political.
- jshevek 10y ago
  I'm saddened to see that you were being down voted. There is a critical mass of people who prefer their worldview not be challenged by evidence.
  - sctb 10y ago
    To this commenter and its parent: please don't complain about downvotes or accuse other community members like you have. On controversial topics, it's even more important that we comment reflectively, civilly, and substantively because it's difficult enough to stay on-topic.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jMyles 10y ago
> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? Historically, the presumption of innocence has two legs: one, the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies). This is something like the theory of knowledge rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The other leg, in the western legal tradition, is that the state (and particularly the prosecution) is always the bearer of the burden of truth. In this sense, it actually makes sense to presume that the police are "guilty," or at least that they must prove that their actions are legal and comport with the boundaries of state power. So, in the western tradition, it is only those accused by the state of a crime who enjoy the presumption of innocence; people acting on behalf of the state do not.
wmeredith 10y ago
I think a lot of that is that there is a huge power imbalance in the interaction. So the presumption of guilt on the officer's part may have something to do with the fact that they are completely in control of the situation from an authoritative standpoint. Having said that, all of these police body camera studies I've been exposed to say that ALL parties behave better, and every conversation I've had about this acknowledges the same.

Aaargh20318 10y ago

> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? No, the police should be held to a higher standard. They are not citizens when they are out on patrol, they are representatives of the government. IMHO police officers should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

danieltillett 10y ago
I don't think anyone should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  They should be able to justify every single action they perform while on duty anyway, and it should be easy with a bodycam. I see no problem in presumption of guilt for officers on duty. At the very least it'll give them incentive to actually wear the cam.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    I am not disagreeing that police officers should be held to a higher standard than others (with great power comes great responsibility), but nobody should ever be presumed guilty and be left having to prove their innocence.
    - Aaargh20318 10y ago
      No one is forcing you to become a police officer. If you want special privileges (e.g. allowed to use deadly force) then you also get special responsibilities.
      - cujo 10y ago
        You're dodging the issue. Assuming the officer is guilty outright, seem dangerous honestly.
        beachstartup 10y ago
        haha dude. he's taking the position because it's extreme. it's called moving the overton window. political talk taken at face value is almost worthless. you can't literally argue with people like this on the internet.
        Aaargh20318 10y ago
        Why would it be dangerous ? As I said, that officer needs to account for all his actions during working hours anyway, so there should never be a problem proving his/her innocence. Or to put it another way: if an officer has, say an hour, on a working day in which (s)he can't account for his/her whereabouts and actions, wouldn't that be a good reason to suspect and investigate that officer ? What was he/she doing in that time, why did he/she feel the need to drop 'off the grid' for an hour ? If they have nothing to hide, then why would it be a problem ?
      - ptaipale 10y ago
        Making the police officer career more risky by imposing arbitrary sanctions in case of bad luck isn't going to improve your chances of recruiting good police officers. Yes, there are special responsibilities, but due process is important. If it's not happening, make that process work. Your approach is similar to "there is too much crime, let's make more laws so that more things are criminal".
BurningFrog 10y ago
There is, in general, no way to prove you're innocent.
pc86 10y ago
Unfortunately your opinion runs contrary to basic jurisprudence.

richmarr 10y ago

> ...there's such a presumption of guilt There's a long catalogue of evidence that the police have been insitutionally racist (and other issues). Specifically in the UK, but I suspect the US has a similar catalogue of evidence. > Maybe the public... The conclusion drawn seems like the most realistic explanation. Your alternatives don't seem credible considering the change also occurred when police weren't wearing cameras. [Edit: "have been" rather than "are" insitutionally racist, evidence is in the past and will hopefully stay that way)

the-dude 10y ago
Do you mean not investigating rape rings because of fear of being called racist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
- colemickens 10y ago
  Oh, a "counter" incident. Institutional racism is officially over!
  - the-dude 10y ago
    It is not over, what I pointed at IS racism. This is not an incident however, this is happening all over Europe. Police are hesitant to reveal real rates of crime, Dutch police advising victims not to press charges because the Northern-African suspects are known to make your life miserable. Calling statistical profiling racial profiling instead etc.
    - lukeschlather 10y ago
      Ethnic profiling is bunk. It kind of works in areas like Israel, where there is literally a war on and the goal of profiling is not to determine criminality, but which side of the war you are on. If you're trying to determine criminality, ethnic profiling doesn't work. It's been proven time and again. It's amazing that we're still having this debate 70 years after the West shed eugenics.

rndgermandude 10y ago

Sure, the presumption of innocence is a two-way street, but it does not always work these days for either party. But to be fair, the article and the original paper discuss all your points as well. There is no "blame everything on the police" attitude there. And body cameras help with all of those: They can substantiate claims against misbehaving police officers, but they can also prove their innocence. Also, it may very well be that citizens, when aware of the cameras, are less confrontational and ill-behaving towards officers, not just officers on best behavior. And if an officer OR a citizen behaves badly, with body cameras you get instant video proof, which helps the victim no matter if the victim was the citizen OR the police officer.

mhuffman 10y ago

Spoken like a person who has had limited interaction with police officers.

jomamaxx 10y ago
I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behaviour on the part of police. Conversely - cops, as a normal part of doing their jobs have to deal with drunk, crazy, wild and violent people quite often. I'm not making a comment about the article, but about the 'presumption of innocence'. I think 'bad cops' are probably an issue of culture within specific policing stations and groups.
- mhuffman 10y ago
  > I have had numerous encounter with police and never, ever had a problem, nor witnesses bad behavior on the part of police. Well that is just amazing to be honest. I have LEO in the family and they all did personality 180s after joining. They converted to an "us vs them" mentality. All of there coworkers were identical. I am not saying that they ran around being assholes to everyone, but they literally started thing less of "others". Every person in the community is a criminal now, they just haven't been caught. You can even see it in action. If you have ever came across a person in the grocery store wearing a high-and-tight and they looked at you with bafflement as to why you did not immediately get out of their way when they were passing -- that was an off-duty cop. BTW, the power-trip doesn't just apply to cops, if you know any correctional officers, you will see the same phenomena. This power-to-bad-behavior conversion isn't just some anecdotal stories, it is well-known in repeated physiology studies.[1] You can see it in their personal lives as well.[2][3] Add to us-vs-them mentality and inflated sense of power a below average IQ (PDF page 92), and you have what we have today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment [2] http://womenandpolicing.com/violencefs.asp http://womenandpolicing.com/violencefs.asp [3] http://www.milestonegroupnj.com/?page_id=348 http://www.milestonegroupnj.com/?page_id=348 [4] http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
  - 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? Why? Presumption of innocence is not a feature of any normal human relationships; it's a special restriction we place on the way the government relates to us. What is the benefit of extending the presumption back to the government? The police are allowed to take your money, rough you up, or kill you if they choose. We can't do that to them.

jshevek 10y ago
Among decent, rational people the presumption of innocence is a function of their normal human relationships. There is nothing special about assuming someone is innocent until sufficient evidence is presented.

wnoise 10y ago

> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? The presumption of innocence is a legal standard to partially offset the immense might of the state. The prosecutors should need to do a very good job establishing that you actually did something before they can put you in a cage. When it's people talking about statistical measures that don't directly disproportionately impact any given person, no, it doesn't.

hueving 10y ago
Did you even read the whole comment you replied to? The op didn't say the statistics were wrong, he/she just pointed out that they could easily be explained by either side of the confrontation behaving better in the presence of a camera. Which one behaves better is not covered by the stats.
- wnoise 10y ago
  Of course I did. And presuming one explanation for the stats is more likely than another because of background knowledge is not unreasonable. I'd go edit in "interpretation of", but it's too late to edit.

solipsism 10y ago

I'm deeply skeptical that a 93% drop in complaints is solely down to bad police officers playing nice for the cameras. This is easy enough to show. And it is the most obvious and natural conclusion. Your skepticism is fine, but I'm confused why you can't understand my lack of it. In my experience cops are trying to get away with anything they can. The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely Nonsense! Being a police officer is not a right. I don't have a "presumption of innocence" regarding my job. I have to actively prove I'm doing it well. Same goes for cops.

JshWright 10y ago

> Maybe the public were better behaved when they being filmed. This is very much the case. I'm a paramedic, and the police agency in the area got body cameras a few years back. It is extremely common (in my first-hand experience) for folks who have been treated completely respectfully to threaten a complaint. Once it's pointed out the whole incident was on camera, it's amazing how often they drop it right there... I have very serious concerns about policing in this country. I think they are trained to jump to lethal force far too quickly, and the militarization we have seen over the past decades has led to an 'us vs them' mentality for many officers. But you're absolutely right that a large chunk of the drop in complaints is almost certainly folks who don't bother pressing an issue once they find out there is video evidence of what happened.

balfirevic 10y ago
That is not at all obvious. There is a large difference in relative power between a citizen and police officer compared to citizen and paramedic. Due to this, I would expect much fewer frivolous complaints against policemen. Now, I do not mean to write this as a proof that there were no frivolous complaints against police, only that you cannot derive any conclusions from number of such complaints against paramedics.
- JshWright 10y ago
  I'm not talking about paramedics wearing cameras (that would be a HIPAA nightmare...). I'm sharing my personal experience from observing a large number of LEO/citizen interactions (cops and paramedics end up on the same scenes quite frequently)
  - balfirevic 10y ago
    Thanks for the clarification, I thought you were talking about complaints towards paramedics.
HaloZero 10y ago
Bu then how does the fact that the drop is on officers with cameras and officers who don't have cameras? The spurious complaints would continue on officers who don't wear them.

headmelted 10y ago

EDIT: when they were being filmed.

whack 10y ago

The article explicitly addresses this question and presents very compelling evidence that the video cameras affect police behavior more so than civilian behavior. Against all expectations, there was no significant difference in complaints between officers wearing cameras that week and those going without. Strange, right? It seems logical to expect that when the camera was actually present, it would act, as intended, as an impartial witness, cooling heads on both sides of an encounter. But complaints dropped even when officers weren’t using the cameras. “It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets — changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” explained the study’s lead author, Barak Ariel, in a Cambridge news release. “With a complaints reduction of nearly 100 percent across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives, to be honest.” The researchers dub this effect “contagious accountability” — learning to do the right thing even when no one is watching.

microcolonel 10y ago
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras. Even the police themselves don't make the distinction when they are the ones wearing it. Why would the public make a distinction when even the one person who should know, can't?
- whack 10y ago
  You're assuming that the civilians are acting under the assumption that the police are wearing body cameras. But why would you assume this? Most police nationwide do not wear body cameras. For most of recent history, the police in those districts did not wear body cameras. When the study was started, obviously the police themselves knew they were wearing cameras, and hence, would have acted differently because they know they were being watched. But the vast majority of civilians do not follow local-police-news closely enough to assume that the police are wearing body cameras.
- mbillie1 10y ago
  > The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes the public even knows how to tell if police officers are wearing body cameras. I don't see how it assumes that at all. I think the gist is that police behave in a way that produces less complaints when they are conscious that their actions are being recorded.

ThomPete 10y ago

I am pretty sure that with the police there is 100% knowledge about them wearing a camera, I don't believe the same applies for the public.

nerdponx 10y ago

My guess was that it was due to fewer people filing frivolous complaints, knowing that there'd be video evidence.

basseq 10y ago
Presuming departments track complaint resolution outcomes, we should see the rate of "legitimate" cases go up. E.g., if 100 cases were filed, 50 frivolous, and the officer in question was sanctioned in 10 cases, that's a 10% rate. If the number of frivolous cases drops to 0, the "sanction" rate should double to 20%.

weberc2 10y ago

I share your surprise. I'm disappointed in the comments here; usually this is where I come to find level-headed conversations based on data and evidence. Instead the top comments are all unsupported and political.

jshevek 10y ago
I'm saddened to see that you were being down voted. There is a critical mass of people who prefer their worldview not be challenged by evidence.
- sctb 10y ago
  To this commenter and its parent: please don't complain about downvotes or accuse other community members like you have. On controversial topics, it's even more important that we comment reflectively, civilly, and substantively because it's difficult enough to stay on-topic.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jMyles 10y ago

> The presumption of innocence needs to be a two-way street, surely? Historically, the presumption of innocence has two legs: one, the Latin "Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies). This is something like the theory of knowledge rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The other leg, in the western legal tradition, is that the state (and particularly the prosecution) is always the bearer of the burden of truth. In this sense, it actually makes sense to presume that the police are "guilty," or at least that they must prove that their actions are legal and comport with the boundaries of state power. So, in the western tradition, it is only those accused by the state of a crime who enjoy the presumption of innocence; people acting on behalf of the state do not.

wmeredith 10y ago

I think a lot of that is that there is a huge power imbalance in the interaction. So the presumption of guilt on the officer's part may have something to do with the fact that they are completely in control of the situation from an authoritative standpoint. Having said that, all of these police body camera studies I've been exposed to say that ALL parties behave better, and every conversation I've had about this acknowledges the same.