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Those who act with the power of the state should be held to the highest standard of accountability. Surely these departments have the manpower to do a civilian
by sickofparadox 3y ago
Those who act with the power of the state should be held to the highest standard of accountability. Surely these departments have the manpower to do a civilian review of any manual bodycam turn-off? If its just the officer turning it off when entering a bathroom, all good, but if its them turning it off before conducting a traffic stop, we have a serious problem.
- jstanley 3y agoEasy loophole: walk into a toilet and turn the camera off, then leave and conduct a traffic stop, then go back into the toilet, turn the camera back on, then leave again and go about your day. The footage will show you walking into a toilet, turning the camera off, turning the camera back on again only an hour and a half later, and then leaving the toilet.
- _8j50 3y agoPrevent the ability to turn it off for longer than x minutes and more than n times in a shift.
- freedomben 3y agothis sounds like a way to discriminate against people with legitimate medical issues, or even just people that drink a lot of water.
- _8j50 3y agoDrink less water or get a medical exemption? That's what the parameters are there for. But even with am exemption you can't be taking a piss for like an hour straight multiple hours a day and be a street cop, at least you should be doing admin duty.
- kiba 3y agoThere's going to be a question about an hour and half later spent in the toilet.
- freedomben 3y agoand ... there's an available toilet on the side of the road where you pulled the person over? and it's not occupied? and the driver doesn't drive away while you're in there? and the driver doesn't make a complaint? and your dashcam (which can't be turned off) is recording the entire thing but nobody ever investigates the 90 minutes of missing footage during which time you were using the computer to look up information and/or write a citation? I'm strongly in favor of strict requirements to use bodycams (to the point where I think if the cop/prosecutor doesn't have camera footage of the entire interaction, it should be grounds for case dismissal. But the above is some pretty conspiratorial level thinking
- jon-wood 3y agoAt which point there’s going to be questions about why you were in the can for 90 minutes.
- ghkbrew 3y agoSure, then they're left with a pretty incriminating pattern of behavior when someone objects to the officers behavior during that traffic stop.
- dkersten 3y agoRight, so when there’s a lawsuit or investigation against the cop where they conducted a traffic stop at the time they were supposed to be in the toilet and there is no footage of this traffic stop, that should be instant evidence towards wrongdoing.
- BurningFrog 3y agoExcept we now have timestamp technology.
- don_neufeld 3y agoAnd GPS. Retain location data during these periods and you’ve covered most of it.
- axus 3y agoMy phone can already modify it's behavior based on my location. We could probably make a "PoliceCam" phone app, and they could tape a phone to the their vest. The current bodycam contracts must be really expensive.
- bonton89 3y agoI mean, I'd just leave my body cam in the toilet for the GPS.
- Thiez 3y agoYou must really believe judges are dumb. So when the traffic stop goes to court, and it shows you were sitting on the toilet for the entire duration of the stop, then either: 1. The traffic stop must have never happened, the defendant is cleared of all charges, or 2. You are committing perjury. You go to jail.
- dopamean 3y agoThis comment is such a great example of how most people would be terrible criminals. Edit: by terrible I mean they'd be bad at not getting caught.
- brewdad 3y agoSimple solution. If there is no body cam footage available, a judge or jury is allowed to make the most negative inference as to the officer's actions. If a camera truly malfunctions, well sometimes police think a cell phone is a gun and the victim doesn't get a do-over. Life isn't always fair officer. We still have to assume the worst.
- sleepybrett 3y agoI'd love to see something similar for destroying evidence. Big scandal about amazon destroying a ton of evidence but the punishment for destroying the evidence is less than the crimes they are being investigated for.
- dragonwriter 3y agoAdverse inference for spoliation of evidence is already a thing in law, and is separate from penalties for the destruction of evidence.
- hiatus 3y ago> a judge or jury is allowed to make the most negative inference as to the officer's actions. A jury is already allowed to make any inference they want.
- seadan83 3y agoIsn't that only true for civil trials? When pleading the 5th in a criminal trial, the jury is not to make an inference about the lack of testimony. Otherwise pleading the 5th would be pretty meaningless if it was always inferred to mean "I'm guilty".
- hiatus 3y agoJurors cannot be tried for their findings. A juror is free to infer that you are guilty when you plead the fifth, in the same way that a jury can let someone off the hook even if they committed the crime (see jury nullification).
- 6510 3y ago> If its just the officer turning it off when entering a bathroom, all good Why? You can edit it out before publication.
- sickofparadox 3y agoBecause police officers are people too and should not suffer the indignity of being recorded while conducting whatever business they need to in the bathroom. On top of the fact that other people could be in there and recording random people in the bathroom should not be allowed either.
- 6510 3y agoIt seems harmless compared to the many indignities officers have to suffer. I'm curious what they think themselves. How much corruption or cocaine use would be acceptable to them? Would having the sound of your pee on recording some place be worse than having corrupt coworkers?
- _DeadFred_ 3y agoDo innocent people ever get stripped out, because that's a heck of an indignity too?
- sickofparadox 3y agoI don't know what you specifically mean by stripped out, but police do subject people to illegal indignities. Those police officers are in the wrong and should be punished, but the logical punishment for that is not "record all officers in the bathroom".
- JohnFen 3y agoI could argue this either way, personally. It seems to me that we give cops extraordinary powers and it's not unreasonable to subject them to levels of scrutiny that would ordinarily be unacceptable, to guard against the abuse of those powers. Particularly since we clearly have a problem with too many cops abusing their power. On the other hand, going to the restroom is not likely to be a place where cops abuse their power (assuming they don't have someone in custody when they do, anyway. Cops do love their loopholes.)
- capableweb 3y ago> If its just the officer turning it off when entering a bathroom, all good Why even allow them to turn it off for this? The footage will be automatically overwritten or deleted at one point anyways. With great power comes great responsibility, and if you're not ready to sacrifice a bit of your privacy in order to be able to legally murder people, maybe you shouldn't be the one who gets put in that position.
- ceejayoz 3y agoI tend to agree; the more reasonable "sometimes you need to turn it off" scenario for me is witnesses/victims of some crimes may refuse to talk on-camera. People wanting to talk about a corrupt cop, for example, may not want that talk going into the evidence server somewhere... Rape victims may not want their face and intimate details going somewhere it might be copied and passed around for laughs.
- capableweb 3y agoBut don't you usually take those people with you to a station, in order to take a proper statement? Or that happens on the scene directly after the fact? One would think they'd at least get to go to a hospital to do a check before they have to talk with law enforcement.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNot necessarily; plenty of initial information gets shared at the scene.