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Body camera footage has to be reviewed and made public if appropriate. But not all body camera footage should be made public. To protect the rights and privac
by VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
Body camera footage has to be reviewed and made public if appropriate. But not all body camera footage should be made public. To protect the rights and privacy of the innocent.
- xfitm3 6y agoIt's this exact mechanism that allows police to bury mistakes. Rarely are the innocent truly protected.
- jayrice257 6y agoThen how do you know if it's rare?
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agonot really
- dependenttypes 6y agoYes, really. There have been countless cases where the police "accidently" "lost" footage critical to a case.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agoMost police body camera footage should never be made public. People have a right to privacy. You don't lose that right just because you had an encounter with a police officer that was filming you.
- floatingatoll 6y agoI think that loss of bodycam footage should be treated equivalently to discharge of a police weapon, with the officer assigned to desk duty until forensic analysis by an independent third party can confirm that the loss was caused intentionally.
- floatingatoll 6y agoI agree that this 'review' mechanism allows police to bury mistakes when the review process is operated by a captive body, such as the police or their union. Correcting that process to independent review is an essential step. I personally think that the review process should instead follow the jury duty process, where citizens are selected at random from the population to review police footage, but I would accept an independent review board as long as less than one third of the members are political appointees.
- dependenttypes 6y agoLeaking the footage to the buyer as in the link is the same as making it public.
- floatingatoll 6y agoThis logic does not follow. If some third-party data leak results in my social security number being published, does that mean it is now ethical for a researcher studying that data leak to post my social security number without redaction? This is not a contrived example: Equifax was, apparently, compromised in full, which means that all American social security numbers issued prior to that compromise can safely be considered 'leaked'. The logic follows that I should be permitted to post anyone's social security number for any reason at all, without regard for the ethics of doing so, because "it's been made public" and therefore all ethical concerns are void. I disagree with this premise. Context of disclosure matters, even if the information has been previously disclosed. Ethical considerations apply regardless of previous disclosure. One disclosure of personal data does not negate the ethical considerations around that same disclosing personal data, even if it has been made public at any point previously. This approach ends up supporting doxxing — where 'public' information is used unethically to target individuals for harassment.