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And maybe we could do something about our policing problem at the same time... What, with using national (military) spying apparatus to go after drug dealers, p

And maybe we could do something about our policing problem at the same time... What, with using national (military) spying apparatus to go after drug dealers, police seizing assets from private citizens who they often don't accuse of a crime, the rampant militarization of domestic police forces... Well, it's nice to dream.

samstave 13y ago
Every cop should be required to were a gopro on their chest. Anyone who has any encounter with a cop should have protected rights to access and review that video as material evidence in their case.
- test1235 13y ago
  ... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is.
  - adamdavis 13y ago
    Sure, and people who are victims of dishonest police can have evidence to support their claims. Everyone wins.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Is it a tough job? You bet. Are they unfairly vilified? Not a chance: police should be held to a higher moral standard than the general public, as they're the ones enforcing it. The best part of them wearing a GoPro is that everyone wins: civilians get to feel much safer, and police get to show that they're not as bad as they're made out to be. The issue arises when the cops have that introduced, and accusations of excess force drop dramatically... that sort of shows that yes, they are as bad as they're made out to be...
    - btown 13y ago
      I largely agree, but to act as a devil's advocate, what about cases when a police officer needs to resort to more heavy-handed methods when their life is in danger? In a dangerous area, a camera cannot capture the entire environment that a police officer must take in, contextual clues to a possibly dangerous situation drawn from a career of near brushes with disaster. So you might see corner cases where a police officer either (a) disregards their gut feeling to exercise caution and speed when apprehending a suspect because they fear being captured on camera, and the officer is injured as a result, or (b) follows their gut feeling, exercises due caution and speed, perhaps is rough on a criminal who has violent intent, and then must allow the criminal to go free even if that caution was necessary, because the jury was more sympathetic to the video of so-called "brutality" than they were to the officer's justifiable mental model of the situation, which cannot be presented so elegantly. Would this system work for less dangerous areas? Probably. For more dangerous areas, I wouldn't want to be a police officer and have this forced upon me. Because corner cases here can be deadly.
      - alecdibble 13y ago
        What if the officer is being filmed by a cellphone camera? There is an even greater chance of the incident being taken out of context. Especially if the police cameras are in a standard location for most officers (say pen pocket), then that fact can be used extensively and easily in video analysis. Secondly, I very very rarely here of juries being "too hard" on police. The current culture is that most police can't be touch even if everyone knows they did it AND has evidence. In a lot of cases, they are untouchable unless their peers want to throw them under the bus or a separate, usually federal service looks into the matter. There are people that, while wearing a camera in a dangerous situation, can remain calm, cool, and collected. If anything, that should be one of the first requirements of becoming a cop, not an argument against cameras.
      - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
        > I largely agree, but to act as a devil's advocate, what about cases when a police officer needs to resort to more heavy-handed methods when their life is in danger? In those cases the safest thing for the police to do is to withdraw to a safe location and wait for backup, which is what they're supposed to do. Engaging in the sort of aggressive behavior that could be "mischaracterized" as police brutality in response to a potentially dangerous situation only serves to escalate the situation and make it even more dangerous.
    - gamblor956 13y ago
      The proportion of bad cops to good cops is probably about the same as the proportion of pervert sexist programmers who like to sexually harass their female coworkers to non-perverted programmers. If your only exposure to either profession is what you see online, you'll have a dim view of both professions. It's true that there is a large number of bad cops--but that's simply because there are a lot cops. Most cops hold themselves to a higher standard, but never show up in the news because it's not newsworthy when a cop does his job.
      - speeder 13y ago
        The problem is a bad cop can cause much more damage... Bad programmers don't have weapons and authority to kidnap people legally.
      - spacehome 13y ago
        Sorry, but I don't think this is even remotely true. Cops overwhelmingly don't testify against other cops. And, in my book, cops that put up the blue wall of silence are bad cops. Not as bad as the cop they're defending -- I don't mean to equate them -- but still bad. While something like that may exist in some engineering-heavy workplaces (I've heard stories but never seen it), it's nowhere near as common or institutionalized.
  - bjdixon 13y ago
    This exactly. Really tough and often thankless job. As shown in Rialto everybody wins when the police wear cameras. Complaints down 88%, use of force down 60% http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-poli...
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      > Complaints down 88%, use of force down 60% Which really just shows how much better cops behave when they know they're being watched and justifies complaints about their corruption.
      - brc 13y ago
        It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. If there is recorded evidence, and the potential complainant knows that exists, then they are less likely to make things up. Many of the people who deal with police on a frequent basis are skilled liars. They know how to stymie investigations by tying the officers up in paperwork. Having video evidence would prevent spurious complaints.
        gnaritas 13y ago
        > It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. Fair point. However, I was a cop, and I know better than to trust cops.
        MartinCron 13y ago
        It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. That's great too! Win-win!
        wisty 13y ago
        It will also make people less stressed when dealing with cops (as they know the cop will behave well), and it will discourage people from resisting arrest / attacking the police, because they know they'll be caught on camera.
  - mahyarm 13y ago
    The police are a case of when it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Instagram down? Not a big deal. Space shuttle software bug? Possible death, explosions and millions of dollars of destruction. The two software systems are developed very differently as a result.
  - baddox 13y ago
    It would show good cops to be good cops, and the few murderers to be murderers. Sounds good to me.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Police are not unfairly vilified; they deserve vilification because they protect their own even when guilty. This is wrong.
  - joesmo 13y ago
    This is an opinion and not based on any real evidence.
  - matwood 13y ago
    ... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is. You would think police departments would jump at the opportunity to wear cameras for this very reason, but they have routinely fought it. A town I lived in the cops fought dash cams for a long time saying they couldn't get enough money to install them. Finally the state supreme court stepped up and started throwing out all DUIs without dash cams and amazingly all squad cars had them installed very quickly.
  - samstave 13y ago
    My dad was a cop in Oakland ca, during the 70s... I would not agree with your statement until i have videos proving otherwise.
- test1235 13y ago
  ... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is.
- eqdw 13y ago
  With a battery life of <2 hours, they're gonna need a different camera /s
  - samstave 13y ago
    Larger external battery on belt. Have a jack in the squad car they connect to wheneversitting in the car. Have an alarm that goes off and logs all times the charger is not connected. Run it off beaglebone or rasberri the whole device and system is less than $500. Steam that shit to the cloud. Want me to price that for you?
- tristan_juricek 13y ago
  A few different police departments in California are trying out camera systems. I've only heard about Rialto, but I know they're being tried out in the Bay Area, and I think wider Los Angeles. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-poli... These aren't "GoPro" systems, so I wouldn't expect stunning HD. I'm not sure about access at all though.
- ne0codex 13y ago
  Ok and who will pay for that?
Yaa101 13y ago
It's a dream to think that law was enacted to put an end to those kinds of troubles. Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain. Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore. The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals? The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it? Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters Get real people!! Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.
- stbarnes 13y ago
  So politicians are in a conspiracy to not stop problems? Sounds unlikely to me, I think it's more like: * Many politicians, like most people, are idiots. Partly because many voters are also idiots. * Politicians don't have strong incentives to stop problems. (But they don't have strong incentives to preserve problems, either. They're only incentivized to be popular.) * Principal-agent problems. Even if a politician comes up with a brilliant solution, the people lower in the chain won't execute it well, because they often don't have strong incentives to. Anyway, there was a conspiracy to preserve problems, any particular politician could start solving problems. This would likely place him above his peers. Then his peers might backstab him, but they also might join him, since he'll have increased popularity. Essentially, we have a sort of iterated n-player prisoner's dilemma; or rather, at each step we choose m people (non-randomly) to together participate in an m-player prisoner's dilemma. It might be interesting to try to model this mathematically.
  - Yaa101 13y ago
    What makes you think there is a conspiracy? It's about oportunity. I wasn't bitching about those people, just explaining how things work on this planet. You know, like a manual.
ne0codex 13y ago
I expect a comment like this on Reddit, not HN.

samstave 13y ago

Every cop should be required to were a gopro on their chest. Anyone who has any encounter with a cop should have protected rights to access and review that video as material evidence in their case.

test1235 13y ago
... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is.
- adamdavis 13y ago
  Sure, and people who are victims of dishonest police can have evidence to support their claims. Everyone wins.
- girvo 13y ago
  Is it a tough job? You bet. Are they unfairly vilified? Not a chance: police should be held to a higher moral standard than the general public, as they're the ones enforcing it. The best part of them wearing a GoPro is that everyone wins: civilians get to feel much safer, and police get to show that they're not as bad as they're made out to be. The issue arises when the cops have that introduced, and accusations of excess force drop dramatically... that sort of shows that yes, they are as bad as they're made out to be...
  - btown 13y ago
    I largely agree, but to act as a devil's advocate, what about cases when a police officer needs to resort to more heavy-handed methods when their life is in danger? In a dangerous area, a camera cannot capture the entire environment that a police officer must take in, contextual clues to a possibly dangerous situation drawn from a career of near brushes with disaster. So you might see corner cases where a police officer either (a) disregards their gut feeling to exercise caution and speed when apprehending a suspect because they fear being captured on camera, and the officer is injured as a result, or (b) follows their gut feeling, exercises due caution and speed, perhaps is rough on a criminal who has violent intent, and then must allow the criminal to go free even if that caution was necessary, because the jury was more sympathetic to the video of so-called "brutality" than they were to the officer's justifiable mental model of the situation, which cannot be presented so elegantly. Would this system work for less dangerous areas? Probably. For more dangerous areas, I wouldn't want to be a police officer and have this forced upon me. Because corner cases here can be deadly.
    - alecdibble 13y ago
      What if the officer is being filmed by a cellphone camera? There is an even greater chance of the incident being taken out of context. Especially if the police cameras are in a standard location for most officers (say pen pocket), then that fact can be used extensively and easily in video analysis. Secondly, I very very rarely here of juries being "too hard" on police. The current culture is that most police can't be touch even if everyone knows they did it AND has evidence. In a lot of cases, they are untouchable unless their peers want to throw them under the bus or a separate, usually federal service looks into the matter. There are people that, while wearing a camera in a dangerous situation, can remain calm, cool, and collected. If anything, that should be one of the first requirements of becoming a cop, not an argument against cameras.
    - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      > I largely agree, but to act as a devil's advocate, what about cases when a police officer needs to resort to more heavy-handed methods when their life is in danger? In those cases the safest thing for the police to do is to withdraw to a safe location and wait for backup, which is what they're supposed to do. Engaging in the sort of aggressive behavior that could be "mischaracterized" as police brutality in response to a potentially dangerous situation only serves to escalate the situation and make it even more dangerous.
  - gamblor956 13y ago
    The proportion of bad cops to good cops is probably about the same as the proportion of pervert sexist programmers who like to sexually harass their female coworkers to non-perverted programmers. If your only exposure to either profession is what you see online, you'll have a dim view of both professions. It's true that there is a large number of bad cops--but that's simply because there are a lot cops. Most cops hold themselves to a higher standard, but never show up in the news because it's not newsworthy when a cop does his job.
    - speeder 13y ago
      The problem is a bad cop can cause much more damage... Bad programmers don't have weapons and authority to kidnap people legally.
    - spacehome 13y ago
      Sorry, but I don't think this is even remotely true. Cops overwhelmingly don't testify against other cops. And, in my book, cops that put up the blue wall of silence are bad cops. Not as bad as the cop they're defending -- I don't mean to equate them -- but still bad. While something like that may exist in some engineering-heavy workplaces (I've heard stories but never seen it), it's nowhere near as common or institutionalized.
- bjdixon 13y ago
  This exactly. Really tough and often thankless job. As shown in Rialto everybody wins when the police wear cameras. Complaints down 88%, use of force down 60% http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-poli...
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    > Complaints down 88%, use of force down 60% Which really just shows how much better cops behave when they know they're being watched and justifies complaints about their corruption.
    - brc 13y ago
      It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. If there is recorded evidence, and the potential complainant knows that exists, then they are less likely to make things up. Many of the people who deal with police on a frequent basis are skilled liars. They know how to stymie investigations by tying the officers up in paperwork. Having video evidence would prevent spurious complaints.
      - gnaritas 13y ago
        > It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. Fair point. However, I was a cop, and I know better than to trust cops.
      - MartinCron 13y ago
        It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. That's great too! Win-win!
      - wisty 13y ago
        It will also make people less stressed when dealing with cops (as they know the cop will behave well), and it will discourage people from resisting arrest / attacking the police, because they know they'll be caught on camera.
- mahyarm 13y ago
  The police are a case of when it goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. Instagram down? Not a big deal. Space shuttle software bug? Possible death, explosions and millions of dollars of destruction. The two software systems are developed very differently as a result.
- baddox 13y ago
  It would show good cops to be good cops, and the few murderers to be murderers. Sounds good to me.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  Police are not unfairly vilified; they deserve vilification because they protect their own even when guilty. This is wrong.
- joesmo 13y ago
  This is an opinion and not based on any real evidence.
- matwood 13y ago
  ... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is. You would think police departments would jump at the opportunity to wear cameras for this very reason, but they have routinely fought it. A town I lived in the cops fought dash cams for a long time saying they couldn't get enough money to install them. Finally the state supreme court stepped up and started throwing out all DUIs without dash cams and amazingly all squad cars had them installed very quickly.
- samstave 13y ago
  My dad was a cop in Oakland ca, during the 70s... I would not agree with your statement until i have videos proving otherwise.
test1235 13y ago
... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is.
eqdw 13y ago
With a battery life of <2 hours, they're gonna need a different camera /s
- samstave 13y ago
  Larger external battery on belt. Have a jack in the squad car they connect to wheneversitting in the car. Have an alarm that goes off and logs all times the charger is not connected. Run it off beaglebone or rasberri the whole device and system is less than $500. Steam that shit to the cloud. Want me to price that for you?
tristan_juricek 13y ago
A few different police departments in California are trying out camera systems. I've only heard about Rialto, but I know they're being tried out in the Bay Area, and I think wider Los Angeles. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-poli... These aren't "GoPro" systems, so I wouldn't expect stunning HD. I'm not sure about access at all though.
ne0codex 13y ago
Ok and who will pay for that?

Yaa101 13y ago

It's a dream to think that law was enacted to put an end to those kinds of troubles. Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain. Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore. The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals? The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it? Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters Get real people!! Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.

stbarnes 13y ago
So politicians are in a conspiracy to not stop problems? Sounds unlikely to me, I think it's more like: * Many politicians, like most people, are idiots. Partly because many voters are also idiots. * Politicians don't have strong incentives to stop problems. (But they don't have strong incentives to preserve problems, either. They're only incentivized to be popular.) * Principal-agent problems. Even if a politician comes up with a brilliant solution, the people lower in the chain won't execute it well, because they often don't have strong incentives to. Anyway, there was a conspiracy to preserve problems, any particular politician could start solving problems. This would likely place him above his peers. Then his peers might backstab him, but they also might join him, since he'll have increased popularity. Essentially, we have a sort of iterated n-player prisoner's dilemma; or rather, at each step we choose m people (non-randomly) to together participate in an m-player prisoner's dilemma. It might be interesting to try to model this mathematically.
- Yaa101 13y ago
  What makes you think there is a conspiracy? It's about oportunity. I wasn't bitching about those people, just explaining how things work on this planet. You know, like a manual.

ne0codex 13y ago

I expect a comment like this on Reddit, not HN.