LAPD Orders Body Cams That Will Start Recording When Police Use Tasers 219
HughPickens.com writes: Lily Hay Newman reports that the LAPD has ordered 3,000 Tasers which, when discharged, will automatically activate cameras on officers' uniforms, creating visual records of incidents at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers. The new digital Taser X26P weapons record the date, time, and duration of firing, and whether Taser wires actually strike suspects and how long the thousands of volts of electricity pulse through them. "This technology gives a much better picture of what happens in the field," says Steve Tuttle.
The idea of using a Taser discharge as a criterion for activating body cams is promising, especially as more and more police departments adopt body cams and struggle to establish guidelines for when they should be on or off. Police leadership — i.e., chiefs and upper management — is far more supportive of the technology and tends to view body-worn cameras as a tool for increasing accountability and reducing civil liability. On the other hand, the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations. "In addition to these new Taser deployments, we plan to issue a body-worn camera and a Taser device to every officer," says Police Chief Charlie Beck. "It is our goal to make these important tools available to every front line officer over the next few years."
The idea of using a Taser discharge as a criterion for activating body cams is promising, especially as more and more police departments adopt body cams and struggle to establish guidelines for when they should be on or off. Police leadership — i.e., chiefs and upper management — is far more supportive of the technology and tends to view body-worn cameras as a tool for increasing accountability and reducing civil liability. On the other hand, the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations. "In addition to these new Taser deployments, we plan to issue a body-worn camera and a Taser device to every officer," says Police Chief Charlie Beck. "It is our goal to make these important tools available to every front line officer over the next few years."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:5, Insightful)
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They probably try to avoid torturing with Tasers. This happens when the Taser is activated multiple times or for extensive durations (e.g. 3 minutes, causing death [wikipedia.org])
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nope. We found this thing called specialization a while ago now.
So society allocates different tasks to different people. And the police are the ones to which we allocate the first step of removing those whom we have decided don't belong in society. And we give them powers that the rest of us don't get to exercise in order to do that task. Which is why it's especially bad when they turn a blind eye to the bad cops who abuse those very powers.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:4, Insightful)
They probably try to avoid torturing with Tasers. This happens when the Taser is activated multiple times or for extensive durations (e.g. 3 minutes, causing death [wikipedia.org])
Well, torture is certainly something that we'd want to avoid... But I agree with someone further up, this trigger for recording misses the circumstances leading up to the event. Was the person actually a threat? is one of the important questions that remain unanswered. Technically the continuously overwritten ring buffer seems hardly more difficult to implement.
Btw, I found this turn of phrase in the story a bit unsettling:
unfair intrusion into their routine activities
Tasering is a routine activity now? I would hope not, although it is better than discharging live rounds at unarmed kids of course.
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Tasering is a routine activity now?
If you read the summary you'll note that concern was with regards to when these cameras should be on vs. when they should be off. Should they be on while the officer is sitting in his patrol car doing paperwork, bitching to his partner about the litany of mundane things (both work related and personal) that co-workers across all professions bitch to one another about? I have friends and family in law enforcement and I'm generally supportive of body cams, but they're going to fundamentally change the natur
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Your bias is making my browser non-horizontal.
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Sorry, late reply and not much time... Just wanted to point out that yes there are cases where unarmed folks are a real threat (Chuck Norris et al, or the severely deranged or psychotic, say due to substance abuse).
But mostly the mere fact that LEO are armed should be sufficiently threatening to subdue and solicit cooperation of unarmed individuals. So when shots are fired in such circumstances it merits rigorous scrutiny via a transparent investigation.
Second, the Grand Jury system as I understand it is a
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They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure it is - the police routinely wear all kinds of other equipment, packing 6 phone batteries around their belt will not exactly be hard.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it is - the police routinely wear all kinds of other equipment, packing 6 phone batteries around their belt will not exactly be hard.
Also, you don't need super high resolution or frame rate, nor is color really necessary. 640x480 and 3 fps in B/W would be "good enough" 99% of the time.
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Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
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Also, the police don't go out on 24/7 shifts. They go out on 8 hour shifts.
Probably not even that. Just like other occupations, they take breaks. Even if the battery only lasted 2 hours,
a simple beep that tells them to return to their car and swap to a new battery would be sufficient.
The gopro advertises 2.5 hours with their regular battery and 5 hours with their extended battery: http://gopro.com/support/artic... [gopro.com]
So using the extended battery and swapping out the battery halfway thru your shift would be sufficient even if they went with the gopro
but surely they could get one op
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Re:why start after the fact? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, how about starting them as soon as a weapon gets unholstered. Gun or taser doesn't matter. OK, the event that made the cop unholster the weapon isn't recorded but everything from that moment is. If the opposing party decides to back off then there would hardly be any need to shoot them anyway.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the point of drawing the weapon is early enough either.
When I hear the testimony in many of the questionable cases, I get the impression that the officers have charged in and escalated the situation to the point that is becomes violent and dangerous. That is behavior that we should capture and use to uncover the needed improvements in public safety.
There are disciplines, such as psychiatric care, that deal with agitated and violent people routinely, where lethal force is simply not an option. People in those positions usually have training in verbal deescalation and non-lethal containment techniques that reduce the chance of injury to both sides. There are a lot of things that can be resolved simply by dropping the "I'm a bad ass and you must obey" attitude. It isn't about abandoning the authority of the position, it is about exploiting normal human behavior to your advantage. And, it isn't a matter of years of professional training, either. Nurse's aids with GEDs are trained in the basics in a couple of hours.
If you are trained to resolve a situation with an unarmed individual by using lethal force, there is a problem with the training. Until we fix that, people will continue to die needlessly, on and off camera.
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Or to use your characterization a moment would be captured where the suspect is not backing off. Such a moment is enough to clear the cop.
Not necessarily. Just because a suspect is not backing off does not mean the officer in the right. If the cop is charging at a 'suspect' with a weapon, without explanation or addressing them or refused to prove their identity as a legitimate police officer, then the suspect could very well be legally taking any actions to defend themselves.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:5, Funny)
For some rough numbers, at 5V a raspberrypi A+ takes 500mA plus 250mA for the camera ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/hel... [raspberrypi.org] ). Maplin sell a 5V 10Ah portable battery pack (for charging phones and tablets) which weighs 330g ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/mapl... [maplin.co.uk] ). So off the shelf hardware gives you a 13 hour battery life.
I assume if energy efficency is your goal you could do a bit better.
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could be voice activated, or RFID'd to start recording when the officer gets out of their car -- plenty of ways to do it
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I was thinking motion activated. It would start recording when they get out of their car and while they walk around and keep recording for five or ten minutes after the motion has stopped.
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That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.
It's not 24/7. The batteries only need to last for say their 10-hour shift; perhaps some extra capacity just in case.
The body cam can also shut off, when the Officer steps in their squad car, and use a break-away charging connector like Magsafe, so the camera automatically turns on and starts recording when the officer leaves their squad car.
They could also have a mechan
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How the hell will they be able to sit in the donut shops then. The last thing we need is hungry officers who are pissed off they can't take a break when they feel like it.
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They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
Why erase it at all? Storage is so cheap, there's no need to overwrite it in the camera.
A GoPro can record 8 hours on a 32GB memory card, so stick 64GB of memory in the body camera and it can record for over 16 hours with a large enough battery pack (which needn't weigh more than the taser that he's already carrying). Power the cop's radio off of the same battery so if the battery is dead he loses radio contact to make it more obvious that the battery is dead.
When his shift is done, he plugs the camera int
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(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack.
(2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell.
(3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
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(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack.
(2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell.
(3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
My 4 oz bike can records about 3 hours on a charge... If 3 ounces of that is battery, that's a 12 ounce battery pack for 12 hours... Like I said , less than a police taser.
Since victims of police abuse know what time that abuse occurred, that takes care of the signal to noise ratio. Of course the data will be valuable to both sides.
Privacy concerns are taken care of just like all public records requests... Private images are filtered out when handing over the data.
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Your bike weight 4oz? What's it made of? Probably not carbon steel or aluminium, I'm thinking.
Autocorrect typo, I figured most people could figure it out by context: can==cam.
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They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
If the LAPD uses the same policy as other departments with body cams, the officer will be instructed to activate the camera whenever about to interact with the public. In which case, the Taser activation would be backup just in case that didn't happen for some reason.
Re:why start after the fact? (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked in an engineering lab at MIT when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and we'd developed one of the first digital field seismometers, and we used a similar technique. Seismometers that were left in the field for weeks were designed to start recording on to mag tape when an event started, but the problem was you'd lose the crucial minutes *before* where interesting things might be happening. Memory was fabulously expensive, so we fed the data off the A/D converter into an array of discrete flip-flops that functioned as a shift register. When recording was triggered, the mag tape would start recording the seismic reading from thirty seconds ago.
The thing is, memory is *not* fabulously expensive anymore. You can find 128 GB USB flash drives for under $20 retail, so the memory chips must be tiny fraction of that. It should be feasible to record an officer's entire shift -- even a double shift -- from an affordable device. I think it's much more practical just to load up on memory than to try to wire up an patrolman with cables and switches. And as with a volcano exploding, the seconds, even minutes leading up to an event are crucial to understanding it.
The concern is privacy/rights (Score:2)
Needs to be thought about for the police too. They are people, and most people are not happy about being watched all the time. I mean think if you had a camera on you that recorded video and audio all day, every day at work. Might you feel a bit uncomfortable? I mean what if you and a coworker are sitting in the break room, complaining, as people do, and later your boss decides to look over the footage because he can and then fires you for it?
So there are reasons to try and find a balance. One thing that co
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This is exactly what they should do. The bodycam should be _always recording_ in a 10 minute continuous ring buffer.
If the Officer calls in an emergency or unholsters or uses handcuffs, a taser, firearm, handcuffs, or other weapon, or if shots are fired, then recording should start and include the 10 minutes before the incident, and continue recording 10 minutes after all police accessories are re-secured.
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Well that's this discussion settled then - tqusasar had a good experience with a cop.
What happened before the tazing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What happened before the tazing? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's right but I wonder to what extent the argument of self defense is still being dragged in. I recall that in the beginning tasers were being presented as an alternative to guns. That was not a credible argument and I would like to see statistics about whether guns have been used less since introduction of tasers. I think that tasers have just become a new way to force people to are no credible danger but who are just not obeying orders . Or not fast enough.
Re:What happened before the tazing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Recall that for a recent shooting of a 12 year old kid in the park the police released video footage. The footage was used in defense of the police actions. They showed a police car driving right up to the kid, getting out and shooting the kid. The cops thought that was perfectly alright because the kid had a gun and they couldn't know the gun wasn't real. But ask any cop in a european country how they would have handled it. First, it's suicidal because if the kid had really been dangerous the cop would have been dead with that maneuver. Second, they should have stayed at a distance and ordered the kid to put the gun down.
Now those cops and taser footage? Any action that the cops don't approve of would be seen (with sincere conviction) as a reason for tasering.
Re:What happened before the tazing? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suppose you'll have kneejerk reactions in both directions. The thing that's popping up now and then is militarization. That they're moving towards warlike thinking and warlike methods.
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I have also seen interviews where ex-servicemen are reviewing footage of police performing conflict-escalation - by aiming their weapons at unarmed civilians - apparently (at least according to this guy) the military are trained not to do this, as it vastly reduces the chances of the situation being defused safely.
It kind of agrees with the ROE card that a friend of mine (Royal Navy Reservist) had, although I had to laugh at the choice of line breaks. On his card, the first side ended with "you may only fir
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Then maybe I should rephrase it. I'm talking about militarization in the sense that you treat the other party as an enemy who is trying to kill you and whose life has very little value in comparison to yours. Not in terms of structure and discipline.
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> They showed a police car driving right up to the kid
I was curious about that one. No one would think that was a good idea. I was wondering if the driver was still looking for the suspect, and wasn't aware he was driving right up to him. Or if the driver saw it correctly as a kid with a toy, just pull up and yell at him for being stupid, but the cop in the passenger seat panicked.
The Ferguson one was even worse in that respect. How the F* does a cop, without backup end up trying to tackle a robbery
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for those involved 10 billion per year that is redirected to the right pockets just means a huge success. To maintain a budget like that you'll hire terrorists if necessary.
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To be honest I don't really think there are any black flag operations involved in whatever you think..
But I do think it's about the money.
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No.
Yes.
Re:What happened before the tazing? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always entertaining to see you activists making these claims about police officers "taking pot shots from 150 ft at someone running the other way".
You guys have clearly never handled a firearm of any sort. If you had, you'd know how damn idiotic your claims are.
It takes a lot of raw skill, experience, training, practice, concentration and even luck to hit a relatively small and moving target, especially one that's moving away, from over 150 feet away, using a handgun. And that's under ideal, indoor conditions.
If you're so wrong about basic stuff like that, then I'm sure you're wrong about everything else you're going on and on about.
Re: What happened before the tazing? (Score:4, Informative)
If both you and target are moving, it's unlikely you will hit your target. Shooting at that range only increases the odds you'll hit an unintended target. Read that: Bad idea.
Want to shoot accurately at that range and beyond ? Use a rifle.
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If anything this would protect the police as well. Was a suspect hostile enough to require tazering? Could help head off lawsuits.
Like it (Score:2)
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A camera on every taser and every gun barrel would allow us to "ease into" the monitoring business.
Why do we need to "ease in"? Many police departments are already using bodycams, and they are working well. There is no excuse for any further delay in universal adoption.
Citation: Police body cams cut violence and complaints [theguardian.com]
After the taser is used is too late.... (Score:5, Interesting)
How about as soon as the holster for the taser (or gun) is unsnapped?
Re:After the taser is used is too late.... (Score:5, Funny)
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You'll need a solution for all that footage of shoes :) But it's an idea. It's also possible to put things in a constant recording loop . Then at any time you have a recording of the last half minute but it gets overwritten all the time unless you pull the taser out of the holster. Then it gets extended.
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Why would the cameras ever need to be off? Just record all the time, never stop. Have 24 hours of storage and rotate through that storage space.
Good idea (Score:2)
Not Micromanagement (Score:2)
the patrol officer culture is concerned that the technology will be an unfair intrusion into their routine activities — for instance, it might invite over-managing minor policy violations.
If you are tasering someone, you are basically assault/battery of someone. That hardly seems like a minor issue, especially if I do to to a police officer they will try to send me to jail for a couple years.
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It's minor compared to a few rounds from a pistol. I think the cops are more worried about all the donut shop footage than anything else though.
What happens when these vindicate the officers? (Score:2)
The recent push for officers to wear body cams, at least in the United States, has mainly been driven by incidents in which black men have gotten killed during encounters with the police.
Whenever one of these incidents occurs, and there's no footage of the incident, we immediately hear from so-called "activists" how the men involved allegedly hadn't done anything to provoke the use of deadly force. We even hear this in cases where there's ample, indisputable evidence to show that the men involved had just c
AFTER the taser? (Score:2)
Broken Windows Theory (Score:5, Interesting)
it might invite over-managing minor policy violations.
Have you heard of the broken windows theory [wikipedia.org]? It may not be appropriate when applied to citizens, who are supposed to be presumed to be the masters of government, not its servants. However, when a person is acting in a public service position that has extraordinary authority and hence extraordinary responsibility, broken windows is far more appropriate.
LEOs are supposed to get in trouble for minor policy violations, and major policy violations should be virtually unheard of. Were we not on the wrong side of that balance, we would not have to implement solutions like this. The few bad cops did this to you. They are the worst enemy of good cops. Go put those mutts in jail, make that the new normal; then we'll talk about easing up on the surveillance.
Too Late Except For The Coroner (Score:2)
Turing on the camera AFTER the taser hits only lets us (the cop-cam viewers) see if the cop then refuses to call in the subject's distress when a pacemaker goes on the haywire or if the subject suffers an epileptic fit.
The point of the body cam is to record the actions before the use of force, to determine whether on not excessive force was used, and secondarily whether alternate tactics would have had a better outcome. At a minimum, turn on the camera when the officer exits the vehicle so as to get contex
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When I started typing my comment, I would have been the first post, when saved there were 41 comments before me, almost all saying the same basic thing. Either great minds think alike and LAPD didn't, or the original article should have gone into more and better details.
Yeah, I know. I must be new, here :-)
Official [non]Compliance (Score:3)
"You want it -- you got it! Only we'll be sure to make bodycams useless." [LAPD] Recording after discharge only captures the damage done for which there is also medical evidence. As mentioned side-thread, it does not record what lead up to the discharge and justifies it. Or not.
Some Police officers may dislike continuous monitoring. (I suspect many don't mind, probably the more honest.) Yet monitoring is routine, nearly universal in the private sector anywhere a dispute may arise. Often at police recomendation!
Do Police Officers think they are "Special"? If so, it is the "short bus" kind :)
Recording starts with Tasing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's why you need to wear a camera. And maybe a taser-proof jacket.
It's up to Citizens to be the Watchers (Score:2)
1. Corrupt officers will always find a way to have their recording equipment 'become ineffective' when they are doing illegal things, like provoking suspects....
2. Corrupt justice officals will always find a way to tamper with evidence so it becomes damaged or lost.
3. It is up to Citizens to be the Watchers, and post the raw video of incidents to Social Media, like youtube, and get the word out.
camera gun (Score:2)
Us versus them mentatilty (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently LAPD regards LA as a wartime battlefield, with the public as the enemy by default.
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Apparently LAPD regards LA as a wartime battlefield, with the public as the enemy by default.
It's like a turkey shoot, with us as the turkeys.
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Police deal mostly with the bad guys, who _are_ the enemy.
Cameras should be on any time the officer is on duty.
Actually, when a cop walks down the street, most of the people he passes by are innocent citizens.
If you look at the stop and frisk statistics that came out in the lawsuits in New York City, something like 95% of the people who were stopped and frisked turned out to be innocent, and most of the remaining 5% were small time pot busts.
Of course, most of the cops were treating innocent civilians as if they were the bad guys, slamming them up against the wall, barking orders and insults at them, etc.
stop and frisk (Score:2)
Nope. See http://www.salon.com/2015/01/1... [salon.com]
Better idea (Score:2)
The same can be done for all weapons the officer wears. This way you have a record of what the target is doing BEFORE they get hit, sprayed or shot.
Police may not be quite so quick to draw their weapon until it is really needed.
needs a law (Score:2)
These are the same guys who broke the antennae off their cars to disable audio recorders that they had to wear. Nobody ever faced any punishment even though over half the antennae in one precinct had been broken off.
The cameras are good, but they need statutory backup making it a felony to not have the camera turned on. There also needs to be a statutory presumption that in the absence of camera footage anything the "defendant" says is considered absolute truth in court and the officer doesn't get to test
Not really (Score:2)
I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
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I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
At all the actual jobs I've had that bad of a screwup would simply mean getting fired. Of course, I didn't have a highly politicized union making sure that I could shamelessly break laws and face no consequences.
Should be on draw instead of discharge. (Score:2)
So what do we expect to see? (Score:3)
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A large reduction in taser use, higher reports of police brutality, slightly higher use of lethal force?
My crystal ball says that there will be an unexpectedly high level of malfunctioning video equipment, triggering a big-money follow-on contract with the manufacturer to correct the problem. The follow-on contract will achieve a just-above the threshold of measurability improvement in reliability. Then, later, when the current brouhaha has been forgotten, the cameras will be left to accumulate drawers with the official evaluation that they were fundamentally defective and so no longer required. And, of co
mounting (Score:2)
at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers
It's a time of mounting political cycle and news cycle, not mounting reality.
In other words ... (Score:2)
The cops will just shoot you or beat you senseless with a baton instead. Or even strangle you with bare hands ... How convenient is that taser-activated camera, indeed!
This is nothing else but a nice juicy piece of pork for Taser and some politicians getting contributions/kickbacks from them, "sold" to the public as a mean to improve the excessive force use.
I'm a bit dubious (Score:2)
Isn't this the same department that has been caught actively destroying their cruiser recording equipment, installed specifically because of abuse concerns? Unless the video is instantly uploaded to remote, third party servers and there are SEVERE penalties for damaged equipment or "malfunctions" then its not going to really mean anything. If officers think they're in the right they'll keep the footage, if they thing they did something wrong there will be an "accident" with it resulting in loss of the vid
They should be on for a full 8 hours every day. (Score:2)
Here someone will say "what about if they go to the bathroom"?
Don't point your camera at your dick. The most anyone will get out of it if you don't point your camera at your dick is the sound of you loudly farting while you use the facilities. Who cares.
Eight hours of digitally recorded video and sound every day. Maintain video on file for 7 days unless something specifically comes up. Then back up the portion of the video that is relevant.
Total cost is about 100 dollars a decent camera. Maybe 20 to 50 doll
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Yeah, you DO need a special camera, because most cheap cameras can't handle low-light conditions very well. It also has to have a resolution high enough that people are easily identified in the footage.
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As to low light, there are a lot of security cameras that have infrared LEDs to handle low light. That is probably fine.
As to the resolution, the context and cross reference with the documentation should be fine. I don't need to pick out a face at 100 feet for the camera to do its job.
The primary point of the camera is so that the police can't manufacture a favorable accounting of the arrest. Simply having audio makes that hard for them to do. The video is just icing on the cake.
Stupid (Score:2)
What a stupid idea. Let's have cameras record what happens after, and none of the events leading up to the usage of the weapon. I think the latter is far, far more important.
A cop's entire day should be recorded, not just when he decides to use force.
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That's not the way do to it. The camera should be recording for the whole shift, but if the officer doesn't unholster a weapon, that day's footage gets erased at the end of the shift. If a weapon is drawn, footage around that event would be saved. Less privacy worries for the officers, and more incentive for them to resolve situations without firing.
Like, for example, choking the victim to death. Cf. Eric Garner, etc.
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Because 99 percent of what happens in a cop's day is mind numbing, boring shit. All we need is the video of the incident. Maybe it should also come on when they call in a stop but to run that thing 24/7 is ridiculous.
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So the choice is really "Record All" or "Record Nothing." Because "Record Something" is just biased and possibly unusable in court. I may be wrong.
Re:Subject Cop To Same Spying They Use On Us (Score:4, Insightful)
So record a 30-minute loop all the time and if some kind of event happens, aoutmatically store the last 15 minutes and the following 15 minutes. The storage could be triggered by gunshot sound, tazer use, or manually, by the policaman. It's not difficult, dashcams for cars work like this (with automatic storage if certain levels of G-force are detected).
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That sounds reasonable. As long as there is some way for video including the event to be saved then it should all be good. I'd think the cops would be okay with that, it would have saved that officer in Jefferson a lot of grief.
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Because the people they deal with on a day to day basis should have privacy, That domestic incident and many other things cops have to deal with should not be public to everyone.
If the domestic incident turns into an Officer Use Of Force incident when the couple turn on the intruding officer, it certainly should be public info.
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Yeah, police cams should be on all the time, but if there is no incident during the shift the whole thing can be erased.
The ploice union may not like it, but the union rep would have to be advised when the tape is subpoenaed
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Exactly, it's not like everybody can just watch the recordings when ever they want. Also, as long it's stored safely along with all of the data they store on us, then they have nothing to worry about. Right? Right...
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I assume that these will work in a manner similar to dashboard cameras. They will buffer some amount of video continuously and write a specified "pre-roll" window to permanent storage when triggered.
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Public record, citizen requests that footage, posts it on youtube. Just because he can.
http://www.businessweek.com/ar... [businessweek.com]
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As long as you act like a jerk you're going to be treated like a jerk. That is the way the
REAL WORLD works.
And of course being a jerk is a capital offense?
There are plenty of accounts of police officers shooting innocent, law-abiding civilians in their homes (usually when a warrant was served at the wrong address or when an informant gave maliciously bad information). Who was the jerk in that case?
Cops are not judge, jury, and executioner.