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North Texas citizens organize to monitor police with video cameras

129 points by appleflaxen 12y ago

sarciszewski 12y ago
Personally, I agree with what they are doing (fundamentally), but they could probably do with a better strategy for how they go about doing it. If they continue this pattern, and something horrible does happen, the department could say, "Well, this group has a history of endangering officers' safety" and a lot of people would swallow that pill without further examination, thus defeating the purpose of what they are doing.
- DamnYuppie 12y ago
  I agree I am for what they are doing but they shouldn't do it in away that endangers the officer or themselves. Now if only we could get people to follow around our Senators and Congress men and catalog everything they are doing that would be great.
  - bsg75 12y ago
    And would highlight a hell of a lot more abuse of position.
  - sarciszewski 12y ago
    I had an idea along these lines... maybe I'll submit it to HN ;)
- ejr 12y ago
  This might be one occasion where throwing technology at the problem may actually be productive. HN has a reputation for using tech as a crutch for social problems, but this is an ideal job for a quadcopter. In the U.S. the FCC was overruled over bans on commercial use of these so that's another barrier lifted. As an added bonus, it also prevents immediate discovery of the pilot and thereby avert suppression to some degree.
- angersock 12y ago
  From the article: "How does it make you feel when you see a cop behind you?" said Tye. "If they're going to do it, maybe they should get a taste of their own medicine." Maybe having cops around endangers peoples safety--when driving, for example, slowing down and causing accidents.
  - sarciszewski 12y ago
    That is a fair point, but two wrongs doesn't make a right. :) Cops carry guns and shoot racial minorities-- do we condone this for everyone? Would allowing minorities to shoot cops for arbitrary reasons solve the problem? If you're going to protest something, abandoning the moral high ground is a bad idea. I'm not saying don't be humble, I'm saying don't lose sight of what you want to accomplish.
mcv 12y ago
How come everybody in north Texas is totally reasonable all of a sudden? People want to film the police but don't hate them, and the police is totally fine with it, but asks them to do so from a safe distance without distracting the police officers.
- exelius 12y ago
  As long as the people doing the recording are non-threatening white hipsters, this policy works fine. But I guarantee some poor black or hispanic kid is going to get shot because a jumpy cop thinks the camera is a gun, and will likely get off with a minor suspension because the justice system views officers as above the law.
  - driverdan 12y ago
    You immediately had to make it racial despite the fact that one of the guys recording is hispanic (Jose)?
    - exelius 12y ago
      Latent racism (e.g. white cops being nervous around black teenagers) is a huge problem in police work. Combine that with the kind of outright racism, the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas and the sense of "respect mah authoritah" many cops give off and I can easily see how someone would get shot.
      - awj 12y ago
        > the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas Arlington, a city of 370k smack between Dallas and Fort Worth is rural? So the cops will get jumpy and start shooting once a hispanic kid shows up (which, one of them was) because they're good old boys from rural Texas (which Arlington isn't) should we keep digging or would you like to admit that your suppositions don't really have a foundation here?
        12y ago
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
It seems the police is having trust issues from the people there; with stories of cops beating up people, I'm not surprised either. This is a good initiative, but to be honest I think it should come from the police precincts themselves. I've read that some police forces use helmet cams, that's a good move - as long as they're mandatory and all footage is checked by an internal affairs department. If someone turns off the camera, that's suspicious. tl;dr, police should work at regaining trust and respect themselves. Them not beating up people following them with a camera is a good first step.
andyzweb 12y ago
sousveillance to maintain the balance
AlisdairSH 12y ago
Too bad the PD won't have their officers wear cameras while on duty. That would resolve the issue without the distraction of somebody following the office around all day.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  Not really, because then the police have the control over the cameras. This officer in Albuquerque [1] was wearing a lapel cam in 3 separate serious incidents, after two of which he was accused of using excessive force and during the third incident he shot and killed a 19-year-old girl. During all three incidents his camera "died" before anything serious started happening. They just learn where the wires are that keeps it running and they pull them out, then reconnect them when they're doing normal stuff. The same thing keeps coming up with dashcams, too. The dashcam footage gets "lost", etc. Maybe one day we'll have technologies and policies that don't allow officers to mess with them, but for the foreseeable future we're the ones who have to be vigilant.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - BigTuna 12y ago
    Watchguard Video, which provides dashcam tech for police departments, is working on a streaming video solution that sends the live video feed back to HQ. I've seen a demo of the system and it's really neat. Cell, WiFi, satellite and a few other receivers are built into one board and firmware dynamically switches the active connection to the device with the strongest signal, ensuring the highest throughput as well as redundancy. It's all locked away in the trunk where it can't be accessed. It won't stop a determined rogue officer but it's a step in the right direction.
  - coder23 12y ago
    I would be satisfied with a ( future )society where everyone wears a recording system, officials have to or they lose their status, and the data is automatically encrypted and uploaded to state servers. Then if proof is needed, the legal system unlocks the appropriate data.
god_bless_texas 12y ago
They need a branding program, because Cop Block sounds way too much like Cock Block. Just what we need, vigilante justice.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  When taking pictures of something becomes "vigilante justice" then we're in the world of newspeak. Reminds me of when, in the wake of 9/11, the Justice Department released a list of domestic terror organizations that included environmental activists who had never hurt anyone.
- HNJohnC 12y ago
  Whooosh! That's kind of the point, hard to forget a name like that.
ndarilek 12y ago
I have a hard time swallowing police department rhetoric in these situations. The officer has a gun, and the unfortunate power to make "extra-legal" killings with it. They're safe. If they irresponsibly use that gun in an unsafe manner, like all the drunken NYPD officers who shoot people[0], then it absolutely is our or someone's responsibility to take matters into our own hands and monitor ourselves until we see that accountability. Relying on internal affairs/review commissions to provide that is a broken model. Also, I know folks doing this locally, and have watched officers request that filmers stand at a safe distance. It's interesting to me how often "safe distance" corresponds with a) somewhere with a shitty view far away and b) a position where the filmer is significantly further away than a number of pedestrians or gawkers whose "safety" presumably isn't in dispute. I have good friends who were arrested for nothing more than filming, and they were often given confusing and contradictory orders by an officer who obviously felt he had the immediate situation well enough in hand to direct most of his attention ordering the filmer around. It happened almost 2 years ago, no charges were filed, and if this was a legitimate concern then I'd really like to see some obstruction charges brought in the several local cases I've seen of citizens arrested for filming. I do agree that some of these groups' strategies are a bit busted. I'm familiar with the Peaceful Streets Project here in Austin, and sometimes the ragey/personal rhetoric got a bit overpowering. Then again, cops kill people, often under suspicious circumstances, and get away with it. Perhaps it is time for a bit of rage, and to make it personal. 0. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/brendan-conin-nypd-shooting-pelham-drunk_n_5247504.htm http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/brendan-conin-nypd-...
- davidw 12y ago
  > I have a hard time swallowing police department rhetoric in these situations. The officer has a gun, and the unfortunate power to make "extra-legal" killings with it. They're safe. Suppose that atleast a few of the police are not the bloodthirsty crazies depicted on reddit, and actually have the best interests of their fellow citizens in mind. You might also suppose that even those people might get paranoid about some guy following them around in a car and pointing stuff at them, because merely having a gun and the ability to use it doesn't automatically make you 'safe'. Putting two and two together, you'd conclude that this article has nothing to do with hacker news and flag it. You folks can downvote all you want, but it doesn't change anything. I value a hacker news free of politics and current events far more than I value 'karma' points.
islon 12y ago
So finally we found a use for google glass.
- msane 12y ago
  Absolutely. Police should have a lapel camera or a Glass like camera rolling at all times. Prevents brutality and (more prevalent) false claims of thereof.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Being under constant scrutiny can help avoid abuses. But it causes a chilling effect - normal people (including police) can freeze or become passive, constantly aware of everybody looking over their shoulder. They become useless.
    - msane 12y ago
      It's a possibility. Police officers aren't really the type of people who are prone to freezing up under scrutiny however. It's already a high pressure job and the people who do it are those who can act under pressure. Also I would say that some people are bound to perform even more excellently when they know their actions may be seen by others. i.e., some people are encouraged to go above and beyond when they are on camera. Controlling the circumstances under which recordings are viewed or released is important to consider as well. The way I see it there are two circumstances for viewing these recordings: - Internal to law enforcement as part of performance review or incident investigation. - Requested by the public in regard to a specific incident.
  - coder23 12y ago
    I don't think the tech is ready just yet. Can't the glass record under half an hour and gets really hot while doing that? Since the police are wearing a uniform, an integrated camera might be better.
    - msane 12y ago
      Yes probably not Glass itself, if only for the fact that they would look ridiculous :P There is something to be said for power of the first-person view however. Maybe a more "police-ish" looking Glass?
jqm 12y ago
Maybe the police are more concerned about being filmed napping in the back of a parking lot (while ostensibly radar gunning for speeders) and less concerned about being filmed brutalizing and shooting innocent people. While both of these types of events occur sometimes, the second type is probably fairly rare and the first type probably much more common. Maybe the idea is that if police think they are being watched they will act in a more accountable fashion. I don't see this being a bad thing at all.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
izzydata 12y ago
When I first read the title I wouldn't have thought people were actually going around following officers. I understand their point, but I also agree that isn't the right way to do it. You shouldn't be looking for trouble, you should just film it if it happens near you. Assuming you get enough people to do something like this then there would be enough people on the road to not have to follow cops around. If the same number of people in the US had dashcams as people do in Russia due to insurance scams I think there would be enough people recording to catch these kinds of things at random encounters.
danbruc 12y ago
WtF?!? This reduces reasons to have a police to absurdity. And at best it will make some of the symptoms go away but not fix the root problem.
logfromblammo 12y ago
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might want to look up CopBlock or Photography Is Not A Crime. If you can tolerate the foil-hattery, this sort of effort also appears periodically on Prison Planet. And if you ever watched the television show COPS and wondered what it would look like if the footage were filmed from the suspect's perspective, just hit LiveLeak, Vimeo, or YouTube and search for "checkpoint videos". The increasing prevalence of cameras in mobile phones, wearable action cameras such as GoPro brand devices, and over-the-air footage-uploading services such as Bambuser have really jolted this new niche of police brutality porn. Further court rulings, such as Glik v. Cunniffe, that reinforced a person's right to record police in public while performing their official duties, have only emboldened crusaders against the corruption behind the thin blue line.

129 points by appleflaxen 12y ago

Personally, I agree with what they are doing (fundamentally), but they could probably do with a better strategy for how they go about doing it. If they continue this pattern, and something horrible does happen, the department could say, "Well, this group has a history of endangering officers' safety" and a lot of people would swallow that pill without further examination, thus defeating the purpose of what they are doing.

DamnYuppie 12y ago
I agree I am for what they are doing but they shouldn't do it in away that endangers the officer or themselves. Now if only we could get people to follow around our Senators and Congress men and catalog everything they are doing that would be great.
- bsg75 12y ago
  And would highlight a hell of a lot more abuse of position.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  I had an idea along these lines... maybe I'll submit it to HN ;)
ejr 12y ago
This might be one occasion where throwing technology at the problem may actually be productive. HN has a reputation for using tech as a crutch for social problems, but this is an ideal job for a quadcopter. In the U.S. the FCC was overruled over bans on commercial use of these so that's another barrier lifted. As an added bonus, it also prevents immediate discovery of the pilot and thereby avert suppression to some degree.
angersock 12y ago
From the article: "How does it make you feel when you see a cop behind you?" said Tye. "If they're going to do it, maybe they should get a taste of their own medicine." Maybe having cops around endangers peoples safety--when driving, for example, slowing down and causing accidents.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  That is a fair point, but two wrongs doesn't make a right. :) Cops carry guns and shoot racial minorities-- do we condone this for everyone? Would allowing minorities to shoot cops for arbitrary reasons solve the problem? If you're going to protest something, abandoning the moral high ground is a bad idea. I'm not saying don't be humble, I'm saying don't lose sight of what you want to accomplish.

mcv 12y ago

How come everybody in north Texas is totally reasonable all of a sudden? People want to film the police but don't hate them, and the police is totally fine with it, but asks them to do so from a safe distance without distracting the police officers.

exelius 12y ago
As long as the people doing the recording are non-threatening white hipsters, this policy works fine. But I guarantee some poor black or hispanic kid is going to get shot because a jumpy cop thinks the camera is a gun, and will likely get off with a minor suspension because the justice system views officers as above the law.
- driverdan 12y ago
  You immediately had to make it racial despite the fact that one of the guys recording is hispanic (Jose)?
  - exelius 12y ago
    Latent racism (e.g. white cops being nervous around black teenagers) is a huge problem in police work. Combine that with the kind of outright racism, the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas and the sense of "respect mah authoritah" many cops give off and I can easily see how someone would get shot.
    - awj 12y ago
      > the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas Arlington, a city of 370k smack between Dallas and Fort Worth is rural? So the cops will get jumpy and start shooting once a hispanic kid shows up (which, one of them was) because they're good old boys from rural Texas (which Arlington isn't) should we keep digging or would you like to admit that your suppositions don't really have a foundation here?
      - 12y ago

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

It seems the police is having trust issues from the people there; with stories of cops beating up people, I'm not surprised either. This is a good initiative, but to be honest I think it should come from the police precincts themselves. I've read that some police forces use helmet cams, that's a good move - as long as they're mandatory and all footage is checked by an internal affairs department. If someone turns off the camera, that's suspicious. tl;dr, police should work at regaining trust and respect themselves. Them not beating up people following them with a camera is a good first step.

andyzweb 12y ago

sousveillance to maintain the balance

AlisdairSH 12y ago

Too bad the PD won't have their officers wear cameras while on duty. That would resolve the issue without the distraction of somebody following the office around all day.

x1798DE 12y ago
Not really, because then the police have the control over the cameras. This officer in Albuquerque [1] was wearing a lapel cam in 3 separate serious incidents, after two of which he was accused of using excessive force and during the third incident he shot and killed a 19-year-old girl. During all three incidents his camera "died" before anything serious started happening. They just learn where the wires are that keeps it running and they pull them out, then reconnect them when they're doing normal stuff. The same thing keeps coming up with dashcams, too. The dashcam footage gets "lost", etc. Maybe one day we'll have technologies and policies that don't allow officers to mess with them, but for the foreseeable future we're the ones who have to be vigilant.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- BigTuna 12y ago
  Watchguard Video, which provides dashcam tech for police departments, is working on a streaming video solution that sends the live video feed back to HQ. I've seen a demo of the system and it's really neat. Cell, WiFi, satellite and a few other receivers are built into one board and firmware dynamically switches the active connection to the device with the strongest signal, ensuring the highest throughput as well as redundancy. It's all locked away in the trunk where it can't be accessed. It won't stop a determined rogue officer but it's a step in the right direction.
- coder23 12y ago
  I would be satisfied with a ( future )society where everyone wears a recording system, officials have to or they lose their status, and the data is automatically encrypted and uploaded to state servers. Then if proof is needed, the legal system unlocks the appropriate data.

god_bless_texas 12y ago

They need a branding program, because Cop Block sounds way too much like Cock Block. Just what we need, vigilante justice.

Tloewald 12y ago
When taking pictures of something becomes "vigilante justice" then we're in the world of newspeak. Reminds me of when, in the wake of 9/11, the Justice Department released a list of domestic terror organizations that included environmental activists who had never hurt anyone.
HNJohnC 12y ago
Whooosh! That's kind of the point, hard to forget a name like that.

ndarilek 12y ago

I have a hard time swallowing police department rhetoric in these situations. The officer has a gun, and the unfortunate power to make "extra-legal" killings with it. They're safe. If they irresponsibly use that gun in an unsafe manner, like all the drunken NYPD officers who shoot people[0], then it absolutely is our or someone's responsibility to take matters into our own hands and monitor ourselves until we see that accountability. Relying on internal affairs/review commissions to provide that is a broken model. Also, I know folks doing this locally, and have watched officers request that filmers stand at a safe distance. It's interesting to me how often "safe distance" corresponds with a) somewhere with a shitty view far away and b) a position where the filmer is significantly further away than a number of pedestrians or gawkers whose "safety" presumably isn't in dispute. I have good friends who were arrested for nothing more than filming, and they were often given confusing and contradictory orders by an officer who obviously felt he had the immediate situation well enough in hand to direct most of his attention ordering the filmer around. It happened almost 2 years ago, no charges were filed, and if this was a legitimate concern then I'd really like to see some obstruction charges brought in the several local cases I've seen of citizens arrested for filming. I do agree that some of these groups' strategies are a bit busted. I'm familiar with the Peaceful Streets Project here in Austin, and sometimes the ragey/personal rhetoric got a bit overpowering. Then again, cops kill people, often under suspicious circumstances, and get away with it. Perhaps it is time for a bit of rage, and to make it personal. 0. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/brendan-conin-nypd-shooting-pelham-drunk_n_5247504.htm http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/brendan-conin-nypd-...

davidw 12y ago
> I have a hard time swallowing police department rhetoric in these situations. The officer has a gun, and the unfortunate power to make "extra-legal" killings with it. They're safe. Suppose that atleast a few of the police are not the bloodthirsty crazies depicted on reddit, and actually have the best interests of their fellow citizens in mind. You might also suppose that even those people might get paranoid about some guy following them around in a car and pointing stuff at them, because merely having a gun and the ability to use it doesn't automatically make you 'safe'. Putting two and two together, you'd conclude that this article has nothing to do with hacker news and flag it. You folks can downvote all you want, but it doesn't change anything. I value a hacker news free of politics and current events far more than I value 'karma' points.

islon 12y ago

So finally we found a use for google glass.

msane 12y ago
Absolutely. Police should have a lapel camera or a Glass like camera rolling at all times. Prevents brutality and (more prevalent) false claims of thereof.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Being under constant scrutiny can help avoid abuses. But it causes a chilling effect - normal people (including police) can freeze or become passive, constantly aware of everybody looking over their shoulder. They become useless.
  - msane 12y ago
    It's a possibility. Police officers aren't really the type of people who are prone to freezing up under scrutiny however. It's already a high pressure job and the people who do it are those who can act under pressure. Also I would say that some people are bound to perform even more excellently when they know their actions may be seen by others. i.e., some people are encouraged to go above and beyond when they are on camera. Controlling the circumstances under which recordings are viewed or released is important to consider as well. The way I see it there are two circumstances for viewing these recordings: - Internal to law enforcement as part of performance review or incident investigation. - Requested by the public in regard to a specific incident.
- coder23 12y ago
  I don't think the tech is ready just yet. Can't the glass record under half an hour and gets really hot while doing that? Since the police are wearing a uniform, an integrated camera might be better.
  - msane 12y ago
    Yes probably not Glass itself, if only for the fact that they would look ridiculous :P There is something to be said for power of the first-person view however. Maybe a more "police-ish" looking Glass?

jqm 12y ago

Maybe the police are more concerned about being filmed napping in the back of a parking lot (while ostensibly radar gunning for speeders) and less concerned about being filmed brutalizing and shooting innocent people. While both of these types of events occur sometimes, the second type is probably fairly rare and the first type probably much more common. Maybe the idea is that if police think they are being watched they will act in a more accountable fashion. I don't see this being a bad thing at all.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

izzydata 12y ago

When I first read the title I wouldn't have thought people were actually going around following officers. I understand their point, but I also agree that isn't the right way to do it. You shouldn't be looking for trouble, you should just film it if it happens near you. Assuming you get enough people to do something like this then there would be enough people on the road to not have to follow cops around. If the same number of people in the US had dashcams as people do in Russia due to insurance scams I think there would be enough people recording to catch these kinds of things at random encounters.

danbruc 12y ago

WtF?!? This reduces reasons to have a police to absurdity. And at best it will make some of the symptoms go away but not fix the root problem.

logfromblammo 12y ago

If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might want to look up CopBlock or Photography Is Not A Crime. If you can tolerate the foil-hattery, this sort of effort also appears periodically on Prison Planet. And if you ever watched the television show COPS and wondered what it would look like if the footage were filmed from the suspect's perspective, just hit LiveLeak, Vimeo, or YouTube and search for "checkpoint videos". The increasing prevalence of cameras in mobile phones, wearable action cameras such as GoPro brand devices, and over-the-air footage-uploading services such as Bambuser have really jolted this new niche of police brutality porn. Further court rulings, such as Glik v. Cunniffe, that reinforced a person's right to record police in public while performing their official duties, have only emboldened crusaders against the corruption behind the thin blue line.