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Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a pu

Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.

eric_h 9y ago
There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly. It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.
- jMyles 9y ago
  I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere, then that place and the goings-on that were witnessed are a matter of public record. If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition. In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.
  - taeric 9y ago
    This is trivial to argue against, though. Officer heads to restroom to help patient that is having seizures. Heck, officer heads anywhere to help citizen having seizures. (Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.) Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.
    - jMyles 9y ago
      The underlying question here is: what does enforcement of the public ordinances have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated those? Why has our society conflated law enforcement with emergency response at all? What do these two things have to do with each other? That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Police often have training in first aid. In addition, they might be much closer than an ambulance, so might be sent to help out in that case. It's not a problem in the least.
      - taeric 9y ago
        And it is not like an officer is enforcing ordinances at all hours. Nor do we expect them to be. Outreach is a thing. An officer goes in to give a fun speech to a school. Suddenly, kids in the class are being broadcast. I get it. Most of us are programmers, so we think we can setup a pretty solid set of rules for when something applies. Maybe some of us can. And when that perfect ruleset is found, it will be awesome. However, it is a lot more fluid and discretion is not necessarily a bad thing.
        cracell 9y ago
        ACLU has written and refined very good rules for proper bodycam use that protects both citizen and police officer privacy. It's not that black and white but it's not that complex of an issue either. Act - https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable-body-cameras-law-enforcement https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable..., White Paper - https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right-policies-place-win-all https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right...
        Brybry 9y ago
        Psst. Kids in class are broadcast all the time on the news. Sometimes they're even identified by name, school, and municipality in recognition for some achievement. Honestly, privacy is nearly dead anyway. I'm not happy about it but there are databases with enough information on us to steal anyone's identity. With that level of information already existing... it seems kind of silly that what we're most worried about with police cameras basically comes down to embarrassment. It's also weird how hacker news has forgotten that Google Street View has tons of pictures of naked people with automatically blurred faces. Same for Google Maps/Earth.
        9y ago
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    > I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere... if the cops bust into your house because they misread the address of the warrant (something which happens regularly), and they capture some video of you walking around eating cereal naked, do you think that should immediately and irrevocably go up on youtube?
    - jMyles 9y ago
      Obviously in a decent society this is a horrific, abhorrent affront. And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim. How about we stop allowing police to search homes in the first place in 99.9% of cases?
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        "And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim." Ok. I'm not.
        yojex 9y ago
        If an agent of the state commits a "horrific, abhorrent affront" against you, you want it to be kept secret? That's what I'm reading here.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        That would be a fair interpretation if that's all they did. However, we all know that law enforcement agents do lots of other things that the people involved would rather not be made public. A cop being a first responder to someone having a seizure, or consoling a rape victim, are things that I'm pretty sure those people would not want to be public.
        mulmen 9y ago
        Ok but in that case the state did not commit an abhorrent act.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    Black and white perspectives aren't helpful. When a policing event happens in a private space, a home for example, there are multiple stakeholders whose interests will not always align.
  - cavanasm 9y ago
    In many places, it's already public record, you just have to request it. However, some places are putting rules in after overly broad and onerous requests ("I want to every piece of body camera footage ever taken" for example, which actually happened in Washington state, and lead to a law a few years later). Usually privacy rights are strongly taken into consideration, and the videos have to be edited and reviewed by humans before release. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/washington-senate-passes-bill-on-police-body-cameras/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/washington-s...
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    Yeah, good idea to have people help everyone. However it would be duplicating loads of state service and, as always, who pays?
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Police catch a child-rapist in the act. Does that go online? What about a normal rape? Someone's husband falsely but convincingly accuses them of domestic abuse, later they are cleared of all charges. Does this accusation go on youtube? Someone attempted suicide, and then called the cops because he didn't want to go through with it. Someone was inadvertently caught on camera in a gay bar when it was raided for drugs.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    You are arrested for murder, rape, or sexual abuse of a domestic pet, following proper procedures, etc., etc. Video of the arrest goes viral. Hundreds of millions of people across the world see it. You are later acquited of the charges. But a fat lot of good that does....
- givinguflac 9y ago
  I’m not saying it should be live streamed to YouTube, just for incidents that are resolved or public, and need long term storage. Obviously there would need to be some editing, ideally by an independent team.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ookware 9y ago
Today my officers spent hours talking to a victim of rape, looking after her children and dealing with the aftermath. I'm sure she'd love that on YouTube for all to see.
- jMyles 9y ago
  I don't think this is a compelling argument. What is the connection between enforcement of statutory code and medical aid / emergency response? Why do these social services need to be delivered by LEOs? At my college, one of the best things my student government did was first response in cases of rape and sexual assault. We had a phone number that people were able to call and get a response from a peer who had been trained in the next steps of response, allowing the victim to gain composure and support before dealing with the law enforcement apparatus. We had a similar service for cases of mental health / psychedelic emergency. There is no reason that law enforcement need to be first responders in cases of medical emergency. Unless we're talking about walking back the Peelian principles (and arguably all that is good about western notions of liberty), it is a continuing imperative to ensure that police officers can strictly enforce the law and do so in full public view.
  - MSM 9y ago
    Replace talking about a rape with any of many reasons the police might be called and it makes just as little sense to have all these videos public. Super innocent example: A 14 year old kid breaks their leg and the cops show up to them in agony and crying. Would be very easy for a few people that dislike them to plaster them crying all over social media. Yes, the event was public to begin with, but the chances of one of the bullies walking by and snapping their own photos is almost nil. A lot of people that are interacting with the police are in a very vulnerable state, it would be asinine to expose that to the world. The thought that it will create "good will" with the public is entirely backwards in my opinion, if I'm in trouble and I know if I get the cops that I may end up all over the internet it may keep me from calling them at all.
    - jMyles 9y ago
fishcolorbrick 9y ago
Yikes! Maybe this is legal, in the same sense that I can go to the bodega and buy a newspaper of local mugshots... but how unfortunate for the people who have the worst 15 minutes of their life faithfully captured and posted on Youtube.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Or maybe on a dedicated reality cable TV channel? Cops 24/7. I'll never be able to get that bad boys song out of my head. Surely there would still be a lot of curation.
phil21 9y ago
No thanks. Now anyone with a minor budget can run every single police video through image recognition and get a whole lot of private info on folks you likely don't want getting out. Happen to be at a party that was broken up due to noise complaints? Drugs were found there? Why were you caught on camera leaving the house when officers arrived? Sounds like you are a liability! If this actually happened I would give it 6mo before you get a credit agency or something of their ilk providing this data to such agencies for background checks/employment checks/etc. It will take the social media data mining and now include all law enforcement interactions ever. I, for one, do not want to live in the world where I get to explain every traffic stop to a future employer or my insurance company. I'm sure both would absolutely love that information to use against me. I think the writing is on the wall on this one though. In my lifetime I fully expect what I describe above to be happening behind the scenes in "public private partnerships". In some cases it already is. Just yet another way to create permanent second-class citizens like we have with felons, and are trying as hard as we can to extend that into other areas of society.
- alasdair_ 9y ago
  I feel the same way about 911 calls - it should require explicit consent of the person calling for those calls to be released outside of court. Having people re-victimized by turning their pleas for help into entertainment is bullshit.

eric_h 9y ago

There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly. It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.

jMyles 9y ago
I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere, then that place and the goings-on that were witnessed are a matter of public record. If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition. In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.
- taeric 9y ago
  This is trivial to argue against, though. Officer heads to restroom to help patient that is having seizures. Heck, officer heads anywhere to help citizen having seizures. (Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.) Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    The underlying question here is: what does enforcement of the public ordinances have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated those? Why has our society conflated law enforcement with emergency response at all? What do these two things have to do with each other? That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Police often have training in first aid. In addition, they might be much closer than an ambulance, so might be sent to help out in that case. It's not a problem in the least.
    - taeric 9y ago
      And it is not like an officer is enforcing ordinances at all hours. Nor do we expect them to be. Outreach is a thing. An officer goes in to give a fun speech to a school. Suddenly, kids in the class are being broadcast. I get it. Most of us are programmers, so we think we can setup a pretty solid set of rules for when something applies. Maybe some of us can. And when that perfect ruleset is found, it will be awesome. However, it is a lot more fluid and discretion is not necessarily a bad thing.
      - cracell 9y ago
        ACLU has written and refined very good rules for proper bodycam use that protects both citizen and police officer privacy. It's not that black and white but it's not that complex of an issue either. Act - https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable-body-cameras-law-enforcement https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable..., White Paper - https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right-policies-place-win-all https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right...
      - Brybry 9y ago
        Psst. Kids in class are broadcast all the time on the news. Sometimes they're even identified by name, school, and municipality in recognition for some achievement. Honestly, privacy is nearly dead anyway. I'm not happy about it but there are databases with enough information on us to steal anyone's identity. With that level of information already existing... it seems kind of silly that what we're most worried about with police cameras basically comes down to embarrassment. It's also weird how hacker news has forgotten that Google Street View has tons of pictures of naked people with automatically blurred faces. Same for Google Maps/Earth.
        9y ago
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere... if the cops bust into your house because they misread the address of the warrant (something which happens regularly), and they capture some video of you walking around eating cereal naked, do you think that should immediately and irrevocably go up on youtube?
  - jMyles 9y ago
    Obviously in a decent society this is a horrific, abhorrent affront. And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim. How about we stop allowing police to search homes in the first place in 99.9% of cases?
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      "And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim." Ok. I'm not.
      - yojex 9y ago
        If an agent of the state commits a "horrific, abhorrent affront" against you, you want it to be kept secret? That's what I'm reading here.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        That would be a fair interpretation if that's all they did. However, we all know that law enforcement agents do lots of other things that the people involved would rather not be made public. A cop being a first responder to someone having a seizure, or consoling a rape victim, are things that I'm pretty sure those people would not want to be public.
        mulmen 9y ago
        Ok but in that case the state did not commit an abhorrent act.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Black and white perspectives aren't helpful. When a policing event happens in a private space, a home for example, there are multiple stakeholders whose interests will not always align.
- cavanasm 9y ago
  In many places, it's already public record, you just have to request it. However, some places are putting rules in after overly broad and onerous requests ("I want to every piece of body camera footage ever taken" for example, which actually happened in Washington state, and lead to a law a few years later). Usually privacy rights are strongly taken into consideration, and the videos have to be edited and reviewed by humans before release. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/washington-senate-passes-bill-on-police-body-cameras/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/washington-s...
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Yeah, good idea to have people help everyone. However it would be duplicating loads of state service and, as always, who pays?
- rocqua 9y ago
  Police catch a child-rapist in the act. Does that go online? What about a normal rape? Someone's husband falsely but convincingly accuses them of domestic abuse, later they are cleared of all charges. Does this accusation go on youtube? Someone attempted suicide, and then called the cops because he didn't want to go through with it. Someone was inadvertently caught on camera in a gay bar when it was raided for drugs.
- mcguire 9y ago
  You are arrested for murder, rape, or sexual abuse of a domestic pet, following proper procedures, etc., etc. Video of the arrest goes viral. Hundreds of millions of people across the world see it. You are later acquited of the charges. But a fat lot of good that does....
givinguflac 9y ago
I’m not saying it should be live streamed to YouTube, just for incidents that are resolved or public, and need long term storage. Obviously there would need to be some editing, ideally by an independent team.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ookware 9y ago

Today my officers spent hours talking to a victim of rape, looking after her children and dealing with the aftermath. I'm sure she'd love that on YouTube for all to see.

jMyles 9y ago
I don't think this is a compelling argument. What is the connection between enforcement of statutory code and medical aid / emergency response? Why do these social services need to be delivered by LEOs? At my college, one of the best things my student government did was first response in cases of rape and sexual assault. We had a phone number that people were able to call and get a response from a peer who had been trained in the next steps of response, allowing the victim to gain composure and support before dealing with the law enforcement apparatus. We had a similar service for cases of mental health / psychedelic emergency. There is no reason that law enforcement need to be first responders in cases of medical emergency. Unless we're talking about walking back the Peelian principles (and arguably all that is good about western notions of liberty), it is a continuing imperative to ensure that police officers can strictly enforce the law and do so in full public view.
- MSM 9y ago
  Replace talking about a rape with any of many reasons the police might be called and it makes just as little sense to have all these videos public. Super innocent example: A 14 year old kid breaks their leg and the cops show up to them in agony and crying. Would be very easy for a few people that dislike them to plaster them crying all over social media. Yes, the event was public to begin with, but the chances of one of the bullies walking by and snapping their own photos is almost nil. A lot of people that are interacting with the police are in a very vulnerable state, it would be asinine to expose that to the world. The thought that it will create "good will" with the public is entirely backwards in my opinion, if I'm in trouble and I know if I get the cops that I may end up all over the internet it may keep me from calling them at all.
  - jMyles 9y ago

fishcolorbrick 9y ago

Yikes! Maybe this is legal, in the same sense that I can go to the bodega and buy a newspaper of local mugshots... but how unfortunate for the people who have the worst 15 minutes of their life faithfully captured and posted on Youtube.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Or maybe on a dedicated reality cable TV channel? Cops 24/7. I'll never be able to get that bad boys song out of my head. Surely there would still be a lot of curation.

phil21 9y ago

No thanks. Now anyone with a minor budget can run every single police video through image recognition and get a whole lot of private info on folks you likely don't want getting out. Happen to be at a party that was broken up due to noise complaints? Drugs were found there? Why were you caught on camera leaving the house when officers arrived? Sounds like you are a liability! If this actually happened I would give it 6mo before you get a credit agency or something of their ilk providing this data to such agencies for background checks/employment checks/etc. It will take the social media data mining and now include all law enforcement interactions ever. I, for one, do not want to live in the world where I get to explain every traffic stop to a future employer or my insurance company. I'm sure both would absolutely love that information to use against me. I think the writing is on the wall on this one though. In my lifetime I fully expect what I describe above to be happening behind the scenes in "public private partnerships". In some cases it already is. Just yet another way to create permanent second-class citizens like we have with felons, and are trying as hard as we can to extend that into other areas of society.

alasdair_ 9y ago
I feel the same way about 911 calls - it should require explicit consent of the person calling for those calls to be released outside of court. Having people re-victimized by turning their pleas for help into entertainment is bullshit.