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A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is suc
by WillAdams 3y ago
A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is such that it may be used as evidence in court.
Body camera footage should be viewed as an extension of that, and when missing or unavailable, that absence should be viewed in the same light as a failure to properly document something in a duty log --- it is a dereliction of duty and of their obligation to be accountable to the public which they ostensibly serve.
- saalweachter 3y agoThis is another example of "an untested backup doesn't exist", as well. Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage, if you treat your body cams as a backup -- and only look at it when something goes wrong -- you're going to discover that your body cams weren't working all along and no one noticed. And then you're going to look hella guilty of hiding evidence, even if it was just bad IT policies & procedures. If you have body cameras, you need a process where you frequently, randomly pull the footage from random officers, and check whether it was turned on, recording properly, filed correctly, whether the camera quality is uselessly grainy, etc etc etc. Otherwise, just like you don't have backups if you aren't testing your restore process, you'll find out you don't have body camera footage even when it would clear you of blame.
- tjoff 3y agoThis can be completely automated though. Noone has to watch any footage unless the system feels like something is wrong with it. And that could be in conjunction with the involved party.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoSeems like good policy to randomly pull bodycam footage on a continuous basis for performance evaluation purposes.
- greedo 3y agoThe article talks about how New Orleans (under Federal consent decree) would evaluate the constitutionality of police stops.
- NickC25 3y ago>Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage. Also, make it so that if a cop is accused of violating rights or involved in foul play, and their body cam "suddenly malfunctioned or were turned off or was left in the car" , a default judgement is given against the officer in question. Make it as ubiquitous to cops as a parachute is for someone who goes skydiving. This must be enforced as harshly as possible. Cops aren't operating on their own dime. If I'm a cop and the choice is leave my camera on or lose my job, my union membership, my retirement, my pension, and also face serious jail time, I'm leaving my camera on every time. The watchers MUST watch the watchmen, and the watchmen must have no expectations of privacy while on duty or being paid by the public.
- koolba 3y ago> Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage. Destroying evidence of a crime is already a felony. Conceal is a tricky one though as depending on placement the camera could definitely be obscured by normal day to day action (like a tussle). But again, if it can shown the action was deliberate, it’d be an action in furtherance of a crime.
- kemayo 3y agoThe suggestion I've seen is to legislate changing the presumption such that if body camera footage is missing then it should be presumed to be foul play unless the police department can show evidence otherwise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- digging 3y agoWhile I agree with what you say for the most part, it's not a question of "what rules can we add on top of the existing structure?". Which is why simply adding bodycams has been so ineffective. We're only really going to be safe from cops by essentially nuking the entire system and starting over. The core issue is that cops are far less vulnerable to prosecution or even non-legal accountability than almost any other citizens. Largely this is due to police unions. In addition to the structural inertia, there's cultural inertia - cops don't want to hold each other accountable either. This is why people talk about reforming police from the ground up. It's actually easier than "fixing" the current system, which actively fights against accountability.
- engineer_22 3y agoSeems like a good idea from QC perspective. Large departments will need to hire additional staff to do the QC checks, but that's not a major hurdle.
- kkielhofner 3y agoTo my knowledge this is managed by the body cam vendors with the kinds of protections/assurances you would expect for something that will need to pass evidentiary chain of custody, etc for something to withstand scrutiny in court: https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-the-Axon-Dock-body2?language=en_US https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-th... Almost kind of funny it uses the Axon-provided cloud at evidence.com. Not kidding. What this boils down to: if the camera footage has been altered or is unavailable some shady cop/department went out of their way to do so. The workflow is extremely simple: hit the record button when you interact with the public, dock the camera (needs to charge anyway) at the end of your shift. There should be no wiggle room for excuses. The vendors have packaged all of this up decently and something like "Oops we deleted that" should never be acceptable. Even the pre-record activation rolling buffer should eliminate nearly any "We missed that because I didn't have time to activate record" scenarios other than maybe "someone ran up on me out of nowhere and started shooting/attacking me". Oh you "forgot" to press a button when you pulled someone over? You shouldn't be a cop, plain and simple.
- brandonbloom 3y ago(disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Axon) It’s also worth noting that recording can be activated wirelessly by various triggers. The most obvious and common one being that a nearby officer’s camera was activated (either by physically pressing the button or via a chain reaction of wireless activations). Depending on the available hardware/accessories & configuration, other sources of activation can include unholstering a weapon, aiming or discharging a taser, by computer aided dispatch, unlocking a weapon in the vehicle, activating the light bar, high vehicle speed, running, falling, crashing, and more. In my opinion, if multiple officers are on the scene at least one axon recording device each: there is either video evidence or willful suppression of evidence. It’s that simple.
- irq-1 3y agoPublicly sharing hashes of video segments as they're created, would validate both the existence of, and unaltered nature of the video.
- falcor84 3y agoAbsolutely agree with the analogy. And I'll just say regarding backups that I really like this shorter formulation: "An untested backup is not." Oh and I recall also hearing "If you're not gonna bother with testing it, then whatever you already have is good enough"
- engineer_22 3y agoI think a jury would be very sympathetic to this argument.
- kemayo 3y agoYou'd think so, but the average jury is extremely deferential to police. In part because a lot of places include some questions about how you feel about the police in the standard jury screening interview, and expressing any negative opinion about police-reliability is likely to get you struck. e.g. check out the NYC standard set of questions: https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/8-Colloquies/Voir%20Dire%20QUESTIONS.pdf https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/8-Colloquies/Voir%20Dire... -- note that 11.a is going to automatically exclude anyone who says something like "I've heard about the blue code, thanks".
- greedo 3y agoIt's not just the average jury, but prosecutors, judges, mayors, city councils. Police get a pass for so much misconduct on an individual and institutional level it boggles the mind.
- engineer_22 3y agoText in question: -> 11. Police questions: (a) Have you had an interaction or experience with a police officer or other law enforcement person, or formed an opinion about police or our criminal justice system that would prevent you from being a fair juror? (b) Under our law, a police officer is not more, or less, believable just because he or she is a police officer. A juror must evaluate a police officer's testimony for truthfulness and accuracy in the same way the juror would evaluate the testimony of any other witness. is there any reason you cannot do so? If a candidate expresses an opinion that would be deferential to either side, they are likely to get struck. This is a feature, not a bug.
- Zigurd 3y agoCan confirm. I hung a jury where the cop clearly lied.
- crazygringo 3y agoOn the one hand, as a matter of principle -- absolutely. On the other hand, bodycams run out of batteries or the electronics glitch or automated video downloads get skipped, in ways that simply don't happen with paper notebooks or data stored in central databases. To assume that it's always a dereliction of duty is not going to be reasonable in practice. Like, for whatever reason my cell phone doesn't automatically sync my photos to the cloud even though it's supposed to. And instead of updating my apps overnight, it starts to update them when I unplug my phone each morning. And automatic OS updates never work, I have to do them manually. Technology's great but technology sucks, too. And I have to assume bodycam software is less reliable than iOS/Android.
- manicennui 3y agoIt's curious how these problems are highly correlated with the police doing questionable shit.
- Aachen 3y agoIs that an assumption, or based on any particular data set or even just a few data points you've anecdotally read about? The article doesn't mention this. It finds some cases where footage is (allegedly) unavailable, but does not look into how often footage is unavailable when nobody cares about it. If you think the cops are corrupt and delete footage of their own wrongdoing, that would need some backing up to be believable for me. Maybe in low-income/low-justice countries that's an assumption one can make, but not where I live at least.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoYou can google for 2 mins and find many examples of hardware mysteriously failing while an officer was violating someone's rights. You can also find many instances of the video being magically deleted..aw shucks. Are there exceptions, like you mentioned? Sure. Are there many, many instances of that being bullshit? Sure.
- 3y ago
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoThe problem is that most people don't consider how much of that footage has privacy implications. They deal with people very single day, they need to be able to turn those cameras off in the case of, a nude minor, a detailing of psychiatric history of a minor, etc. The problem is that giving them that ability also opens the door for them to abuse it. There is no easy/good answer here. And I'm not making excuses for them, if they're abusing it go scorched earth on them please, their position in society means they require it. But police MUST be able to turn their cameras off.
- CptFribble 3y agoI disagree, police should not be able to turn off the cameras, but the footage should NOT be public by default. Instead, the footage should be regularly audited by a vetted third party not connected to the police, police union, of families of police. The footage should of course be archived for some long period of time measured in years for use in proceedings, and audits the discover significant periods of no footage not attributable to technical malfunction should be grounds for immediate dismissal of the officer. Making allowances for the officer to decide when it's "appropriate" to turn off the camera will inevitably lead to the current situation of the cameras being not used nearly enough - only instead of "oops it was off" it will become "I used my judgement that this was a sensitive event and turned it off, whoops now no one knows who shot first"
- rekoil 3y agoThis is my take as well. Complement it with asking the officer to try to identify periods where the video might need to be deleted to save a whole bunch of time for those working to process the data.
- sokoloff 3y agoIt’s not at all obvious to me that any expensive or time-consuming processing of routine/boring bodycam video is needed.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
- FireBeyond 3y ago> A police officer in performance of his duties should have zero expectation of privacy, and has a legal obligation to fill out an accurate duty log, which is such that it may be used as evidence in court. However, in 35 states, and this blows my mind, an officer can have "consensual" sex with a detainee. Even if they are in handcuffs at the time. 35 states have decided that this is not improper from an "authority" perspective (leaving aside for now the whole "having sex while on duty"). There was a recent case where a minor who was in custody and handcuffed had sex with two officers in their patrol vehicle. The officers claimed it was consensual and the courts agreed. I do not believe they even faced disciplinary action. > Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill. Because police and police departments and police unions know that even post-BLM, they will face little, usually zero, consequences for doing so, or for wasting taxpayer dollars fighting to defend their refusal.
- jquery 3y ago35 states allow for that? I would've assumed 0 states allow for it, because, well, come on. Might as well let officers consent to taking bags of money from detainees.
- greedo 3y agoMost states allow for "taking bags of money from detainees" under civil asset forfeiture.
- naasking 3y agoThat becomes state property though, I think the analogy in this case is that the cops take the money themselves.
- FireBeyond 3y ago"Thankfully", following on from the outrage following this (it was 2018), some states have criminalized it... though only six, now that I look into it. So the accurate number is now 29. Hell, it only became criminal for federal police 18 months ago! Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-close-police-consent-loophole-law https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/congress-c...
- korse 3y agoWe need the police. I guarantee the alternative power structures that would develop in their absence would be worse. This said, if we want people to sign up for the role, there needs to be some protection and privacy in place for them. They are also people, with families and in some cases organized and dedicated opposition. In pursuit of these goals, zero expectation of privacy seems like an unrealistically high bar.
- babyshake 3y agoThe simple answer is for there to be consequences. Turning off or camera or deleting the footage should be treated the same as not reading a suspect their Miranda rights.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> Turning off or camera or deleting the footage should be treated the same as not reading a suspect their Miranda rights. It's your view that deliberately concealing evidence is no worse than not handling the administrivia of an arrest correctly? As I recall, Miranda was introduced specifically to force police departments to tell arrestees their rights, which the law already required them to do. Miranda made it possible for courts to dismiss charges, if the suspect had been questioned without being told his rights. Trying to compel the police to obey the law just because it was the law simply failed. Th only way it could be enforced was to get several prominent prosecutions (of guilty people!) dismissed.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoBro I have extremely bad extremely 2023 supreme court news for you, vis a vie Miranda Rights.