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Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

227 points by jseliger 6y ago

bird_monster 6y ago
Shocker. edit Will add context. Police oversight will always be a totally unbalanced fight for power. Police obviously do not want their behavior analyzed because of the obvious and frequent abuse of that power. For some reason, lots of america believes that being a police officer should come with total unchecked power amongst their communities - even so much as scrutinizing their use of excessive force has become a politicized nightmare. So no, it is in no way surprising that police oversight is garbage and continues to give police easy outs.
ahoy 6y ago
The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. When you combine that with the privileged status that comes with law enforcement you get a real mess. The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavoidable.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  That power doesn't just disappear though. It'll be taken by a mob / gang / warlord, take your pick. Good luck demanding bodycams then!
  - ahoy 6y ago
    I never suggested dismantling all systems of social cohesion and accountability. I said too much of the power that maintains social order is vested in a single place.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Even if police has less power, they still can lie to you or give you misleading advice and then turn it against you and you will have no way to prove malice. I witnessed this couple of times and I was shocked that something like this is possible. I think to build the trust of the public, governments should invest in creating technology allowing recording all incidents in full. If there is no accountability all bad apples get free reign and you will have no recourse.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  > The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets. Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response. A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy. This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.
  - hvdfhbj 6y ago
    Better still, get mentally ill homeless people off the street and into institutions where they belong. Building a camp out in the desert somewhere where people like this can get three square meals and a bed would both be an improvement on their present situation and a total money saver once you take into account all the problems and waste of police/ambulance time that they cause. Even better if you extend it to drug addicts.
- hvdfhbj 6y ago
  Why is it that the same people who think that the solution to bad public schools is more funding also think that the solution to bad police departments is less funding? If the police are substandard it means we need to pay them more to get better quality applicants into the system. We also need a better funded prison/drug rehab system so that police don't have to waste their time dealing with the sort of habitual offenders who should have been permanently removed from society a long time ago.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    Why is it that the same people who think the solution to bad public schools is more oversight and accountability, seem to oppose increased oversight and accountability for bad police departments? There's no indication that funding is an actual problem that a lot of these "bad" departments face. Teachers regularly have to buy their own supplies for their classrooms. Have you ever heard of a cop needing pay out of their own pocket for ammo for their service weapon, gas for their patrol car, or batteries for their radios?
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    My theory: I'm betting in these communities where people tend to say this, schools are falling into disrepair, classes are overcrowded, and a substantial number of students rely on school free lunch and breakfast for their nutrition. So it's natural such communities would want less money to go to police, which they probably see as victimizing a community, putting people in jail for low-level drug crimes and messing with people's jobs and livelihood through bail/fines, and more money to go to schools, which they see as helping a community and providing beneficial services.
    - hvdfhbj 6y ago
      It would seem such communities would be the ones with most to gain from a better funded police force and justice system, one that could permanently remove the criminals from their midst.
      - 6y ago
yardie 6y ago
With all the smart sensors available today it should be possible to start recording automatically. You unholster or unbuckle your weapon, camera goes live. It's become far too easy to say you forgot to do activate it in the heat of the moment. Even a 20yo car knows when a passenger is or isn't sitting in the seat.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Not only that, but the device could have ten minutes rolling before that in a circular buffer. But the problem here isn't one that we can solve with tech alone. It's cultural to the institution of policing.
  - davidf560 6y ago
    > It's cultural to the institution of policing. It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes. That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.
- thescriptkiddie 6y ago
  You can buy dash cams now with a 24 hour circular buffer and an onboard battery that lasts just as long. It would not be hard to just record everything for an entire shift, then copy the video to a server while the body camera is recharging.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Bandwidth is still the limiting factor here. Even with on-premise offload and storage, many municipalities aren't built to move the volume of data of recording every officer all the time. Add that cloud services are the bodycam goto which requires an Internet upload speed to match...
wombatpm 6y ago
If we really want body cameras to work, there needs to be penalties for nonuse. For example lack of body camera removes qualified immunity protections for the officer(s) in question. My personal philosophy is that if called to be on a criminal jury, if the case relies on the officer's testimony and there is no camera, I will return a verdict of not guilty under the justification that the state has failed to prove its case. A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message
- sneak 6y ago
  Juries, historically, uncritically accept unsubstantiated cop testimony at face value. It’s a huge problem.
  - tylerfontaine 6y ago
    I sat as a juror in a murder trial several years ago. My peers accepted nearly every piece of prosecutorial testimony without question, not just cops. It was really eye-opening. Because even if that hadn't happened, the whole concept of lesser included charges meant the man on trial was almost certain to be guilty of something. If it wasn't Murder 1, it was murder 2, or manslaughter, or wreckless endangerment. In my case the guy was (as best I could conclude) legitimately guilty of one of the lesser included charges, but there was some dodgy testimony, and I was the only one, in my group, to question it, and suggest that it might have some bearing on which of the many charges that might actually make him guilty of. It took quite some convincing to get anyone else to drop to anything lower than the top charge. While I realize that this sample size of 1 is statistically insignificant, it really seems like if you wind up in court on criminal charges, odds seem to be you're screwed. "Innocent until proven guilty" felt, to me, like a pipedream.
    - michael1999 6y ago
      That's why a jury is so large, and conviction requires unanimity. Good for you. How many on your jury?
crispyporkbites 6y ago
Is there a way to remove articles about the American police force from HN? Yes we know they’re bad/unethical and a problem for Americans. But is this really something that “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”? Isn’t it just flamebait now?
- shortstuffsushi 6y ago
  You are probably right that Hacker News isn't the best forum for policing discussion. In fact, the "off-topic" region of the guidelines would indicate this as well imo. But people have upvoted it to the front page, so there must be some interest at least. Best bet is probably to flag and move on.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    The HN community is not magically immune to the flaws of online communities. There are always differing points of view, trolls, and warriors for a cause.
- williamtwild 6y ago
  I agree. This is something that I would expect to see on reddit and not HN. I come here to get away from that noise.
- zests 6y ago
  It is mildly disappointing. Not necessarily that this article is here but if an article were posted that is equally interesting yet coming from another political bent, it would be almost immediately marked [flagged] and hidden. Even if the article were interesting.
wombatmobile 6y ago
> The cameras are relatively simple to operate. They constantly record everything in front of them, but only save 30 seconds of video at a time. To record an entire incident, the officer must double press the “event” button in the center of the camera. So non-compliance is the default. And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the double-press has registered? Why not buffer 5 hours by default?
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Agreed. I assumed they buffered the whole work day such that following an incident, the investigating officers (and not the officer under investigation) would initiate the persistence of a particular incident.
- Cancan82 6y ago
  Because that would work actually work? We don’t actually want to have recordings, just say that we have them. But seriously, I would imagine the storage costs aren’t that terrible relative to the costs it would save in lawsuits for the police departments ?
- davidf560 6y ago
  > Why not buffer 5 hours by default? Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues. Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
  - 6y ago
stuntcoder 6y ago
it's a common sort of outcome for most attempts at police reform in the USA - buying the police bodycams are one of many "obvious" fixes that somehow don't work This is educational if you are interested in leveling up your thinking on it https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/1533398363539/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_CRside.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...
- leetcrew 6y ago
  your link is just condensed talking points for people who already support the abolish position. I don't see how it could "level up" anyone's thinking, particularly someone who is wondering whether they should support abolition to begin with.
noodlesUK 6y ago
I don’t know why we accept this. It would be easy to make it so if an officer failed to turn on their body cam, and a complaint was filed (which should buffer an entire shift, or at least an hour or so), the presumption is there was misconduct and the officer should be fired, and possibly tried for criminal charges. If I failed to take appropriate records of my job, or fulfil my duties (esp if my job were safety critical), and a complaint was lodged, I’d be out the door.
- cumwolf 6y ago
  Unfortunately filing complaints in Chicago doesn't result in discipline towards on officer. If a complaint is sustained by COPA (the agency responsible for accepting and investigating complaints) then COPA gets to make a "recommendation" to the Chicago Police Department with how to discipline the officer involved. It is then up to CPD whether they want to actually follow that recommendation or not. A separate but related issues is that officers also don't always oblige to requests for their identification in the event of an altercation. Source: Chicago resident who has filed complaints
eplanit 6y ago
Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the U.S.[0], and is rising rapidly[1]; but, invariably the criticism is focused solely on the police. By the weight of coverage and outrage, one would think that Chicago faces no issues other than bad police. Yes they should have their body cams on. Why so little attention to the reality in Chicago that the police are facing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [1] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-murders-2020-crime-fbi/6431761/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-murders-2020-crime-fbi/64317...
- tom_ 6y ago
  Rightly or wrongly, I guess people just feel they have a right to hold the police to a much higher standard than the criminals.
- varispeed 6y ago
  If government wants to continue with drug prohibition then they should provide adequate policing. You can't have a cake and eat it too. You cannot blame the environment if this is what you created. If police cannot handle gangs, then why don't they lobby for drug legalisation? Or is it that they quite enjoy drug busts and undeclared cash on the side?
- wmeredith 6y ago
  This is textbook whataboutism and the answer as always is that one problem's existence doesn't preclude the treatment of another. How about we address both problems? This article is talking about the police problem.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    But nobody talks about the murder problem. Those who try to are called racists.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago
canada_dry 6y ago
It's beyond incredible that we allow a "no knock warrant" (e.g. Breonna Taylor) with police that have body cams, yet there is no standard practice that says a senior officer must ensure they are operating and recording BEFORE they begin.
danso 6y ago
One of the larger data points is deep into this (very lengthy) story: an estimated 10% of stops that are mandated to be recorded (e.g. not conducted by officers in specialized teams that don't operate with cameras) were marked by officers as not having body camera footage. That doesn't include incidents – such as the story's main anecdote – in which officers claim there is footage even when there isn't, or much of it is missing. > CBS 2 obtained data on more than 340,000 of those stops between the start of 2018 — the first full year all patrol officers had body cameras — and June 30, 2020. > More than 62,000 stops during that period didn't have body camera video, the data showed. > About half of the interactions that weren’t recorded involved police officers who are not required by policy to wear body cameras, including those on specialized teams. > In order to find out how many stops were potential policy violations, CBS 2 isolated stops made by cops who would normally wear body cameras. It shows about 34,000 stops — roughly 10 percent — were made by officers not assigned to gang, gun or saturation teams.
zingplex 6y ago
I'm stunned that people are having a hard time getting accountability from a police department known for having a “black site” where they routinely tortured suspects. If only there was some sort of sign that these people can't be trusted.
- cumwolf 6y ago
  I think there's so many signs they can't be trusted but I personally often find people don't believe it to be systemic or institutional and therefore it doesn't impact their overall opinion. Homan Square is a well known police black site but it still exists today despite so many protests
  - zingplex 6y ago
    I've long been advocating prison abolition, a component of which is police abolition. When discussing such matters I often will ask people what measurable line in the sand must be crossed for them to believe sweeping systemic change is necessary. My anecdotal findings are that either people will set the bar absurdly high, meaning that they believe the only circumstance that requires system change is an active mass extermination program targeting a majority of the population or they will place the bar far below where we currently are now but then refuse to listen to any evidence that we have actually far surpassed that threshold, usually presenting an endless stream of weak, easily refuted arguments.
xendop 6y ago
Even if they turn them on, many body cams in use store the files locally on an SD card with no authentication or verification of chain of custody, just flat video files. It is trivial to wipe evidence from these Axon cameras especially - https://github.com/xraymemory/haxon https://github.com/xraymemory/haxon
gcc_programmer 6y ago
my 2 cents: anyone who even thinks of defunding the police should visit a country with no police (for example a favella in Rio at night) and report back their results. The experiment will likely not be very repeatable.
- triceratops 6y ago
  You're saying that if the police in Rio had more money, the favelas would be safer? Why?
- jussij 6y ago
  The concept of defunding the police is not an attempt to eliminating the police force. It is just a name that tries to capture the fact many US police forces look more like an army than a typical police force found in other parts of the world. That is what needs to change.
  - hvdfhbj 6y ago
    That is the "sanewashed" version of the slogan, yes. Ultimately it's classic motte-and-bailey, a slogan that means entirely different things depending on whether you're playing attack or defence at any given time.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      If you're aware there are multiple interpretations of the slogan, why not assume good faith, and debate the "sane" meaning of the phrase? Most people are centrists, so the "insane" interpretations are never going to get any sort of audience any way. Debating the "insane" interpretation is easy - a cheap win.
      - hvdfhbj 6y ago
        While in general I agree with the idea of debating the strongest version of your opponent's ideas, I think it's okay to call out a clear motte-and-bailey when you see one, and require the other team to come back with a sensibly-phrased proposition to debate. If you tell me "We should kill all the Jews, and by 'Kill all the Jews' obviously I mean that we should increase capital gains tax by two percent" then I'm not going to debate capital gains tax with you, I'm going to tell you to go away and come back when you stop using words in such a deliberately ridiculous way.
vkou 6y ago
Body cams are an expensive diversion that tries to use technology to solve a legal, procedural problem. HN loves them, because hey, there are interesting technical questions about their deployment, but they accomplish nearly nothing. The real issue is that even when police impropriety is discovered, with mountains of evidence to support it, oversight bodies have no ability to censure the officers involved. In Seattle, for example, the civilian oversight office offers non-binding disciplinary suggestions to the only body that can discipline police officers - their union. Unsurprisingly, the union takes those non-binding suggestions, and puts them right into the paper shredder. On the county level, until quite recently, the oversight organization couldn't even subpoena records from the sheriff's department - it would ask the department to turn over records, and the department would kindly tell them to go pound sand. The only other form of oversight is raising a criminal case against the officer involved. Because of the discretionary nature of prosecution in this country, and because of a huge conflict of interest, where 99% of the time, prosecutors work in tandem with the police, prosecutions are frequently sabotaged for political reasons. (See the Breonna Taylor indictment - where the prosecutor deliberately sabotaged the case he presented to the grand jury.) And on top of that, the bar for a criminal conviction of a police officer is astronomically high. No amount of body camera technology is going to fix either of those three problems.
throwaway201103 6y ago
Nothing happens in Chicago unless the proper people are getting their payoffs.
blkknightarms 6y ago
Chicago has been and is synonymous with corruption. It's not a surprise. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-117 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-11...
cumwolf 6y ago
As a Chicago resident who has been involved in multiple protests, Chicago police are very lax with their body cams. During protests this past summer many officers had no badge, nameplate, or body cam present. This results in absolutely no accountability of this individual and their actions. The police have much to benefit with civil unrest and crime in the city. Chicago police receive 40% of the city's budget. We invest so heavily in policing yet we are known for our murder rate. Police do not prevent the violence in Chicago they only respond to it. This is because the police profit off of the crime in Chicago. The city continues to refuse to divest from policing and invest in the communities which are struggling the most.

227 points by jseliger 6y ago

Shocker. edit Will add context. Police oversight will always be a totally unbalanced fight for power. Police obviously do not want their behavior analyzed because of the obvious and frequent abuse of that power. For some reason, lots of america believes that being a police officer should come with total unchecked power amongst their communities - even so much as scrutinizing their use of excessive force has become a politicized nightmare. So no, it is in no way surprising that police oversight is garbage and continues to give police easy outs.

ahoy 6y ago

The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. When you combine that with the privileged status that comes with law enforcement you get a real mess. The problem is, as in so many cases, fundamentally about power. Until police have less power (that is, less funding, fewer numbers, and a smaller scope of responsibilites), i fear these kinds of abuses are almost unavoidable.

secondcoming 6y ago
That power doesn't just disappear though. It'll be taken by a mob / gang / warlord, take your pick. Good luck demanding bodycams then!
- ahoy 6y ago
  I never suggested dismantling all systems of social cohesion and accountability. I said too much of the power that maintains social order is vested in a single place.
varispeed 6y ago
Even if police has less power, they still can lie to you or give you misleading advice and then turn it against you and you will have no way to prove malice. I witnessed this couple of times and I was shocked that something like this is possible. I think to build the trust of the public, governments should invest in creating technology allowing recording all incidents in full. If there is no accountability all bad apples get free reign and you will have no recourse.
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
> The police in america generally have too much responsibility and consume too many of our resources. Part if this is because many other social services are cannibalized either due to drops in tax revenue, or in order to fund the constantly bloating police budgets. Part of the "defund" process (I know, very poorly named!) is to take both responsibility off police shoulders and $$$ out of police budgets and put those dollars into social response. A great example are mental wellness response to psychotic breaks among homeless. Rather than having police have to deal with hours of interaction (and police report paperwork), send in qualified health workers, i.e., those that have been trained for years to deal with this rather than a rookie cop with 6 months at the academy. This would prevent cops from having to handle all kinds of other stuff, especially situations where they are not at all qualified to handle.
- hvdfhbj 6y ago
  Better still, get mentally ill homeless people off the street and into institutions where they belong. Building a camp out in the desert somewhere where people like this can get three square meals and a bed would both be an improvement on their present situation and a total money saver once you take into account all the problems and waste of police/ambulance time that they cause. Even better if you extend it to drug addicts.
hvdfhbj 6y ago
Why is it that the same people who think that the solution to bad public schools is more funding also think that the solution to bad police departments is less funding? If the police are substandard it means we need to pay them more to get better quality applicants into the system. We also need a better funded prison/drug rehab system so that police don't have to waste their time dealing with the sort of habitual offenders who should have been permanently removed from society a long time ago.
- triceratops 6y ago
  Why is it that the same people who think the solution to bad public schools is more oversight and accountability, seem to oppose increased oversight and accountability for bad police departments? There's no indication that funding is an actual problem that a lot of these "bad" departments face. Teachers regularly have to buy their own supplies for their classrooms. Have you ever heard of a cop needing pay out of their own pocket for ammo for their service weapon, gas for their patrol car, or batteries for their radios?
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  My theory: I'm betting in these communities where people tend to say this, schools are falling into disrepair, classes are overcrowded, and a substantial number of students rely on school free lunch and breakfast for their nutrition. So it's natural such communities would want less money to go to police, which they probably see as victimizing a community, putting people in jail for low-level drug crimes and messing with people's jobs and livelihood through bail/fines, and more money to go to schools, which they see as helping a community and providing beneficial services.
  - hvdfhbj 6y ago
    It would seem such communities would be the ones with most to gain from a better funded police force and justice system, one that could permanently remove the criminals from their midst.
    - 6y ago

yardie 6y ago

With all the smart sensors available today it should be possible to start recording automatically. You unholster or unbuckle your weapon, camera goes live. It's become far too easy to say you forgot to do activate it in the heat of the moment. Even a 20yo car knows when a passenger is or isn't sitting in the seat.

Pfhreak 6y ago
Not only that, but the device could have ten minutes rolling before that in a circular buffer. But the problem here isn't one that we can solve with tech alone. It's cultural to the institution of policing.
- davidf560 6y ago
  > It's cultural to the institution of policing. It's not just culture, it's the police unions as well. Any new tech (like auto-recording when the weapon is drawn) generally has to have union approval. Unions are frequently resistant to these kinds of changes. That, and also police agencies in general are pretty much the exact opposite of high-tech. The younger officers probably embrace technology having grown up on it, but a lot of the more senior people are wary of anything technological and see it as just another hindrance to their job. These are not people who sit in front of computers all day like we do.
thescriptkiddie 6y ago
You can buy dash cams now with a 24 hour circular buffer and an onboard battery that lasts just as long. It would not be hard to just record everything for an entire shift, then copy the video to a server while the body camera is recharging.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Bandwidth is still the limiting factor here. Even with on-premise offload and storage, many municipalities aren't built to move the volume of data of recording every officer all the time. Add that cloud services are the bodycam goto which requires an Internet upload speed to match...

wombatpm 6y ago

If we really want body cameras to work, there needs to be penalties for nonuse. For example lack of body camera removes qualified immunity protections for the officer(s) in question. My personal philosophy is that if called to be on a criminal jury, if the case relies on the officer's testimony and there is no camera, I will return a verdict of not guilty under the justification that the state has failed to prove its case. A couple of hung juries and the powers that be may get the message

sneak 6y ago
Juries, historically, uncritically accept unsubstantiated cop testimony at face value. It’s a huge problem.
- tylerfontaine 6y ago
  I sat as a juror in a murder trial several years ago. My peers accepted nearly every piece of prosecutorial testimony without question, not just cops. It was really eye-opening. Because even if that hadn't happened, the whole concept of lesser included charges meant the man on trial was almost certain to be guilty of something. If it wasn't Murder 1, it was murder 2, or manslaughter, or wreckless endangerment. In my case the guy was (as best I could conclude) legitimately guilty of one of the lesser included charges, but there was some dodgy testimony, and I was the only one, in my group, to question it, and suggest that it might have some bearing on which of the many charges that might actually make him guilty of. It took quite some convincing to get anyone else to drop to anything lower than the top charge. While I realize that this sample size of 1 is statistically insignificant, it really seems like if you wind up in court on criminal charges, odds seem to be you're screwed. "Innocent until proven guilty" felt, to me, like a pipedream.
  - michael1999 6y ago
    That's why a jury is so large, and conviction requires unanimity. Good for you. How many on your jury?

crispyporkbites 6y ago

Is there a way to remove articles about the American police force from HN? Yes we know they’re bad/unethical and a problem for Americans. But is this really something that “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”? Isn’t it just flamebait now?

shortstuffsushi 6y ago
You are probably right that Hacker News isn't the best forum for policing discussion. In fact, the "off-topic" region of the guidelines would indicate this as well imo. But people have upvoted it to the front page, so there must be some interest at least. Best bet is probably to flag and move on.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  The HN community is not magically immune to the flaws of online communities. There are always differing points of view, trolls, and warriors for a cause.
williamtwild 6y ago
I agree. This is something that I would expect to see on reddit and not HN. I come here to get away from that noise.
zests 6y ago
It is mildly disappointing. Not necessarily that this article is here but if an article were posted that is equally interesting yet coming from another political bent, it would be almost immediately marked [flagged] and hidden. Even if the article were interesting.

wombatmobile 6y ago

> The cameras are relatively simple to operate. They constantly record everything in front of them, but only save 30 seconds of video at a time. To record an entire incident, the officer must double press the “event” button in the center of the camera. So non-compliance is the default. And compliance failure is as easy as an incorrect double-press that fails to start recording. Is there even any feedback that the double-press has registered? Why not buffer 5 hours by default?

throwaway894345 6y ago
Agreed. I assumed they buffered the whole work day such that following an incident, the investigating officers (and not the officer under investigation) would initiate the persistence of a particular incident.
Cancan82 6y ago
Because that would work actually work? We don’t actually want to have recordings, just say that we have them. But seriously, I would imagine the storage costs aren’t that terrible relative to the costs it would save in lawsuits for the police departments ?
davidf560 6y ago
> Why not buffer 5 hours by default? Because then you end up with recordings of things that you shouldn't have, like the officer using the restroom or a victim who has asked not to be recorded. Also, several minutes of buffer fits nicely in RAM. 5 hours would require a lot more RAM (making devices more expensive and thus harder to get deployed) or would require it to be written to flash disk which introduces new technical and legal issues. Additionally, recording 5 hours for each incident has one significant problem: every video that gets recorded has to be stored on device during the shift (not a big problem), but it also has to be offloaded and stored somewhere for archival. Do the math sometime on what kind of bandwidth and storage capacity a large agency like NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, etc. would need to upload several hours worth of officer-recorded video each day. I've done that math and the numbers are staggering.
- 6y ago

stuntcoder 6y ago

it's a common sort of outcome for most attempts at police reform in the USA - buying the police bodycams are one of many "obvious" fixes that somehow don't work This is educational if you are interested in leveling up your thinking on it https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/1533398363539/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_CRside.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f...

leetcrew 6y ago
your link is just condensed talking points for people who already support the abolish position. I don't see how it could "level up" anyone's thinking, particularly someone who is wondering whether they should support abolition to begin with.

noodlesUK 6y ago

I don’t know why we accept this. It would be easy to make it so if an officer failed to turn on their body cam, and a complaint was filed (which should buffer an entire shift, or at least an hour or so), the presumption is there was misconduct and the officer should be fired, and possibly tried for criminal charges. If I failed to take appropriate records of my job, or fulfil my duties (esp if my job were safety critical), and a complaint was lodged, I’d be out the door.

cumwolf 6y ago
Unfortunately filing complaints in Chicago doesn't result in discipline towards on officer. If a complaint is sustained by COPA (the agency responsible for accepting and investigating complaints) then COPA gets to make a "recommendation" to the Chicago Police Department with how to discipline the officer involved. It is then up to CPD whether they want to actually follow that recommendation or not. A separate but related issues is that officers also don't always oblige to requests for their identification in the event of an altercation. Source: Chicago resident who has filed complaints

eplanit 6y ago

Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the U.S.[0], and is rising rapidly[1]; but, invariably the criticism is focused solely on the police. By the weight of coverage and outrage, one would think that Chicago faces no issues other than bad police. Yes they should have their body cams on. Why so little attention to the reality in Chicago that the police are facing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [1] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-murders-2020-crime-fbi/6431761/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-murders-2020-crime-fbi/64317...

tom_ 6y ago
Rightly or wrongly, I guess people just feel they have a right to hold the police to a much higher standard than the criminals.
varispeed 6y ago
If government wants to continue with drug prohibition then they should provide adequate policing. You can't have a cake and eat it too. You cannot blame the environment if this is what you created. If police cannot handle gangs, then why don't they lobby for drug legalisation? Or is it that they quite enjoy drug busts and undeclared cash on the side?
wmeredith 6y ago
This is textbook whataboutism and the answer as always is that one problem's existence doesn't preclude the treatment of another. How about we address both problems? This article is talking about the police problem.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  But nobody talks about the murder problem. Those who try to are called racists.
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canada_dry 6y ago

It's beyond incredible that we allow a "no knock warrant" (e.g. Breonna Taylor) with police that have body cams, yet there is no standard practice that says a senior officer must ensure they are operating and recording BEFORE they begin.

danso 6y ago

One of the larger data points is deep into this (very lengthy) story: an estimated 10% of stops that are mandated to be recorded (e.g. not conducted by officers in specialized teams that don't operate with cameras) were marked by officers as not having body camera footage. That doesn't include incidents – such as the story's main anecdote – in which officers claim there is footage even when there isn't, or much of it is missing. > CBS 2 obtained data on more than 340,000 of those stops between the start of 2018 — the first full year all patrol officers had body cameras — and June 30, 2020. > More than 62,000 stops during that period didn't have body camera video, the data showed. > About half of the interactions that weren’t recorded involved police officers who are not required by policy to wear body cameras, including those on specialized teams. > In order to find out how many stops were potential policy violations, CBS 2 isolated stops made by cops who would normally wear body cameras. It shows about 34,000 stops — roughly 10 percent — were made by officers not assigned to gang, gun or saturation teams.

zingplex 6y ago

I'm stunned that people are having a hard time getting accountability from a police department known for having a “black site” where they routinely tortured suspects. If only there was some sort of sign that these people can't be trusted.

cumwolf 6y ago
I think there's so many signs they can't be trusted but I personally often find people don't believe it to be systemic or institutional and therefore it doesn't impact their overall opinion. Homan Square is a well known police black site but it still exists today despite so many protests
- zingplex 6y ago
  I've long been advocating prison abolition, a component of which is police abolition. When discussing such matters I often will ask people what measurable line in the sand must be crossed for them to believe sweeping systemic change is necessary. My anecdotal findings are that either people will set the bar absurdly high, meaning that they believe the only circumstance that requires system change is an active mass extermination program targeting a majority of the population or they will place the bar far below where we currently are now but then refuse to listen to any evidence that we have actually far surpassed that threshold, usually presenting an endless stream of weak, easily refuted arguments.

xendop 6y ago

Even if they turn them on, many body cams in use store the files locally on an SD card with no authentication or verification of chain of custody, just flat video files. It is trivial to wipe evidence from these Axon cameras especially - https://github.com/xraymemory/haxon https://github.com/xraymemory/haxon

gcc_programmer 6y ago

my 2 cents: anyone who even thinks of defunding the police should visit a country with no police (for example a favella in Rio at night) and report back their results. The experiment will likely not be very repeatable.

triceratops 6y ago
You're saying that if the police in Rio had more money, the favelas would be safer? Why?
jussij 6y ago
The concept of defunding the police is not an attempt to eliminating the police force. It is just a name that tries to capture the fact many US police forces look more like an army than a typical police force found in other parts of the world. That is what needs to change.
- hvdfhbj 6y ago
  That is the "sanewashed" version of the slogan, yes. Ultimately it's classic motte-and-bailey, a slogan that means entirely different things depending on whether you're playing attack or defence at any given time.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    If you're aware there are multiple interpretations of the slogan, why not assume good faith, and debate the "sane" meaning of the phrase? Most people are centrists, so the "insane" interpretations are never going to get any sort of audience any way. Debating the "insane" interpretation is easy - a cheap win.
    - hvdfhbj 6y ago
      While in general I agree with the idea of debating the strongest version of your opponent's ideas, I think it's okay to call out a clear motte-and-bailey when you see one, and require the other team to come back with a sensibly-phrased proposition to debate. If you tell me "We should kill all the Jews, and by 'Kill all the Jews' obviously I mean that we should increase capital gains tax by two percent" then I'm not going to debate capital gains tax with you, I'm going to tell you to go away and come back when you stop using words in such a deliberately ridiculous way.

vkou 6y ago

Body cams are an expensive diversion that tries to use technology to solve a legal, procedural problem. HN loves them, because hey, there are interesting technical questions about their deployment, but they accomplish nearly nothing. The real issue is that even when police impropriety is discovered, with mountains of evidence to support it, oversight bodies have no ability to censure the officers involved. In Seattle, for example, the civilian oversight office offers non-binding disciplinary suggestions to the only body that can discipline police officers - their union. Unsurprisingly, the union takes those non-binding suggestions, and puts them right into the paper shredder. On the county level, until quite recently, the oversight organization couldn't even subpoena records from the sheriff's department - it would ask the department to turn over records, and the department would kindly tell them to go pound sand. The only other form of oversight is raising a criminal case against the officer involved. Because of the discretionary nature of prosecution in this country, and because of a huge conflict of interest, where 99% of the time, prosecutors work in tandem with the police, prosecutions are frequently sabotaged for political reasons. (See the Breonna Taylor indictment - where the prosecutor deliberately sabotaged the case he presented to the grand jury.) And on top of that, the bar for a criminal conviction of a police officer is astronomically high. No amount of body camera technology is going to fix either of those three problems.

throwaway201103 6y ago

Nothing happens in Chicago unless the proper people are getting their payoffs.

blkknightarms 6y ago

Chicago has been and is synonymous with corruption. It's not a surprise. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-117 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5a55/city-of-silence-11...

cumwolf 6y ago

As a Chicago resident who has been involved in multiple protests, Chicago police are very lax with their body cams. During protests this past summer many officers had no badge, nameplate, or body cam present. This results in absolutely no accountability of this individual and their actions. The police have much to benefit with civil unrest and crime in the city. Chicago police receive 40% of the city's budget. We invest so heavily in policing yet we are known for our murder rate. Police do not prevent the violence in Chicago they only respond to it. This is because the police profit off of the crime in Chicago. The city continues to refuse to divest from policing and invest in the communities which are struggling the most.