This is a good step in the right direction. What I would ultimately like to see is mandatory, impossible to shut off, police wide body cameras. There is no reason in this day and age to not have it.
Well there is the use case of the PO exercising his or her judgement in a situation where there may technically be a violation, e.g. carrying an open bottle of beer. Today, a PO can simply require the perpetrator to discard the beer and then both parties move on.
If we have cameras in that situation, the PO will have no choice but to issue a summons to the person and then potentially have to show up in court if the person requests it.
Is that the best use of our police officers and the courts time? I think your intention is to provide citizens protection against police abuse of our rights but I think that the situation is more complex and getting the right mix of tech and humanity in police practices requires better training and education of both the police and the citizenry.
If this became a rampant issue, maybe it would be time to rethink the law? Discretion allows abuse. Laws that are not applied uniformly run counter to the notion of "Rule of Law".
This happens quite a bit with underage drinking. Cop catches some kids who are not quite 21 with beer and instead of fining every kid up to $1,000 and suspending their license (which is now on their record), he makes them ditch the beer and move on. Rethinking the law means we’d decide it’s ok for all teens to drink. Sometimes the laws are solid, but there are shades of gray in terms of how to apply them.
> Cop catches some kids who are not quite 21 with beer and instead of fining every kid up to $1,000 and suspending their license (which is now on their record), he makes them ditch the beer and move on.
...unless they're black?
There's no reason to give cops this discretion, it just leads to unfair policing practices. Better to have police enforce all laws and think hard about what we want those laws to be.
Discretion can certainly be abused, but systems of rigid rules can only realistically approximate justice. Human discretion will always be important to avoid injustice.
I agree, but I'd rather see this discretion at the judicial level where there is a framework under which it operates and judges with presumably more moral, legal, and ethical training.
If a prosecution is legally justified, a court can’t do anything about it. At best, you could hope for jury nullification (but the rules of evidence might keep the jury from ever learning the morally-exculpatory evidence), or failing that, lenient sentencing.
This is what I was alluding to. Historically judges have had a lot of leeway when it comes to sentencing, and, having heard all the details of the case, they are in the best position to decide the defendant's fate. (For what it's worth, I disagree with mandatory minimum sentencing laws.)
I’d much rather a police officer be able to make the call to not pursue something than regularly have people stand trial for trifles. If you don’t give the discretion to cops or prosecutors, that is the alternative.
If they did, it would lead to the political will to change the law. Because they don't, we are stuck with the non-uniform application of the law which causes tension in communities. Justice is not dispensed by police, it is frankly not their job. Pointing out that we'd have a lot more people getting ticketed just shows how broken the system actually is in its current form.
> Cop catches some kids who are not quite 21 with beer and instead of fining every kid up to $1,000 and suspending their license (which is now on their record), he makes them ditch the beer and move on. Rethinking the law means we’d decide it’s ok for all teens to drink.
Doesn't overlooking the beer also mean we've decided it's ok for teens to drink? What is the difference you see?
I'm quite sympathetic to your argument, although having been a teenager (age 19) that got caught with beer and had a cop let me off (he could clearly see that we were trying to be responsible, and were not causing trouble) I think there is value in not being a total hard ass while still not blanket condoning stuff. That said, in this case I absolutely agree that alcohol should not be restricted to anybody 18 and over. If we have a point where you are "an adult" then you should be a free person at that point.
So it really comes down to philosophically purity vs. pragmatism. I'm naturally drawn toward the former, but as I've gotten older I see more value in the latter, even tho intellectual it bothers me.
I think the difference is in assessing a situation - is it always ok for all teens to drink? Or is it more about assessing whether to sometimes scare them a little by giving them a talking to and reminding them it’s not legal - and other times (if they endanger lives or get caught multiple times) enforcing the penalties as appropriate. Much like speeding or running a stop sign - sometime just getting pulled over is enough to remind you to slow down.
If they endanger lives, etc, we already have laws against that. If people regularly speed on a road the local government should consider raising the limit or installing speed bumps. If we have a problem with a law we should fix it rather than avoid enforcement.
I don’t see this being an issue. Most (all?) police cruisers already have dash cams which almost certainly routinely capture footage of people speeding and breaking various other traffic laws which the police overlook, but no one is going back to review that footage and cite them.
Presumably the footage is archived and only reviewed for disputes, court, etc.
If we suddenly have a rash of police under enforcing, is that really a problem? Body cameras aren’t there to ensure police enforce the law, they’re there because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
True, too often this discretion is only exercised for friends, relatives, and the powerful. Occasionally it gets extended to people who remind the officer of those people, because they fit the preconceptions or remind the officer of their own youth or family.
I agree with you in theory, but in practice I wouldn't be so sure. There are plenty of people that suffer and have their lives ruined because they are the first victims of a bad law. The legislative process moves very slowly, sometimes it takes decades (look at Cannabis laws for example).
Under enforcement based on individual judgement easily introduces racist bias
I agree with your point tho, bureaucracy has trouble thinking about edge cases, it's hard to create a complete spec of things like not requiring bringing someone in for an open beer if they aren't clearly drunk
> I agree with your point tho, bureaucracy has trouble thinking about edge cases, it's hard to create a complete spec of things like not requiring bringing someone in for an open beer if they aren't clearly drunk.
It is very much the job of the courts to interpret the law with respect to those edge cases and their judgements can provide guidance to politicians about how to more narrowly define the law. This is how things are supposed to work _in theory_.
Even on the optimal path, there's a long lag and (potentially) a bunch of ruined lives between "We think we wrote a law that appropriately covers all the edge cases" and "Oh, hey, this court decided this edge case is covered this way". That lag can be helped by giving the bureaucracy enforcers a way to use common sense to bypass the bureaucracy.
I agree, but ultimately society has weighed the trade-off and moved in favor of the ruining of some lives for the wheels of justice to grind forward. That is why society tends to reify martyrs imo. We have countless examples in history. For things to change people suffer and we elevate their suffering to some third party that can recognize its injustice. Peaceful protests are exemplars of this notion.
Aren't US cops afforded any personal input? I've been stopped in the UK for something I probably should have been arrested for, but the cop said he was just going to let me go because I was nice to him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've worked with a few police departments in a previous life. For the last few years I worked with the bigger dept they all wore cameras for their entire shift. They still let people go for small amounts of weed, or odd drinking violations (open intox usually) even though it's still illegal here.
They only review the videos if there's an incident or complaint. So it's not like there's someone watching 40 x 8 hour videos every day.
/this is a smaller rural area in the midwest US, so ymmv but these officers do use discretion and the higher ups don't care if it's nothing big. In the Chief's words, "we were all young and stupid at some point."
Why would they have no choice? Where are people getting this idea that an officer HAS to do something when a law is broken? If that was true, they would be in trouble all the time for driving down the road and not stopping speeders, or getting in trouble for not reporting things other POs have done that is illegal. A police officers discretion in executing the law is an enshrined privilege of being an officer and a camera isn't going to change that. Nobody will ever even be looking at those videos if nothing is reported.
I like the idea of mandatory body cams, but obviously they need to be able to turn it off or remove it for things like restroom breaks.
Instead, there should be extremely strong disincentives (such as being fired, barred from working in law enforcement, jail time, etc) for an officer to turn off their body cam when interacting with the public.
Citizens should also be able to know whether the camera is on (blinking red light etc) and be able to report instances where it was not.
I've had a thought for a while, that if a cop can produce their body cam footage, then they were acting as a cop. If they cannot, then they were acting as a private citizen (and their actions must be judged as though any other private citizen had done them). It seems sufficient to me, but I'd love to hear peoples' ideas on how it would be abused. I'm guessing it falls apart somewhere around how evidence is judged to be admissible (cops actually have tighter rules than private citizens?), but I really don't know.
That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it would work in practice. How much police abuse goes unpunished due to legal protections afforded to police, vs. police departments and prosecutors protecting each other?
I believe there should be a special prosecutor specifically for police. This would remove the conflict of interest between prosecutors and the officers they rely on to work with them to do their jobs.
First, police that break the law actually need to see real punishment. What is the point of body camera footage if they can get away with murdering people on camera anyway?
More transparency isn't a guarantee of justice. Look at the cases of Eric Garner and Danny Shaver. Their murders were recorded on camera and both responsible officers walk free today.
I think the other posters are implying it's not a step. The public is currently aware to how police abuse their power and walk free. The situation is like a fox guarding the hen house. The farmer being "justice" doesn't seem to care when the fox takes a hen whenever it happens.
I'd rather the camera always record and make the "off" button a "private" button that encrypts the footage (but not metadata) when pressed. If the "private" footage is relevant to something police can get a warrant for a specific time range.
Don't need to turn it off for restroom breaks or for anything while they're on-duty because that off-switch will be abused.
And realistically the footage that's of interest isn't going to be those personal moments (or overhearing a call with the officer's family, say) it's the ones where the officer is engaging with a member of the public. And maybe limit viewing access to in-person, by court order, or to credentialed journalists or something.
If anything, that's an argument for legal rather than technical enforcement. If you can cover the camera or take it off, why not just allow disabling it temporarily? Maybe put a time limit on how long it can be disabled.
>There is no reason in this day and age to not have it.
Sure there is, there are enormous privacy concerns with how police body cameras can be used, and barely any of the departments which have adopted them have reasonable policies for governing that. What about interviewing vulnerable victims? How do you handle FOI requests? What about the departments that want to incorporate facial recognition into their body camera program? Would you like the police to have a database of your movements, or the political events you attend? None of this even addresses the fact that these programs have also largely failed to provide the transparency and accountability they promised. I’m not arguing for one side or the other, but to claim there are no reasons against them is dismissive and ignorant.
We definitely need laws regulating facial recognition (both for the government, and companies), but police body cameras make the public safer because they might think twice about shooting you if they know that they are being recorded. But of course we also need to make them accountable for their wrongdoings otherwise the cameras won't help much.
They should have a filled red circle or red LED showing when recording, as per the convention, plus a filled blue circle or steady blue LED on when they're not, while low battery or another inoperability fault should show a blue half circle or blinking blue light.
When recording is activated, a pure 1-second tone should sound, with an audible voice indicator "bodycam number ### recording" with a timestamp and location. When recording is deactivated, a 1-second series of short chirps , with an audible voice indicator "bodycam number ### deactivating in 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, off".
That way, if a cop is turning off the camera at an inappropriate time, someone else can start recording before it cuts off, or the cop can cancel the deactivation without interrupting the recording, and if a suspect hears or sees all cops turning off their cameras at once, they might have a possible defense for resisting arrest. Furthermore, the recording of one cop's camera would be able to show if another cop's camera was on or off.
Ultrasonic tones outside the range of human hearing could encode "bodycam ### is recording" or "bodycam ### is not recording" or "bodycam ### case has been opened", so that any available audio recording without a high-frequency filter could decode it enough for a lawyer to request preservation of evidence from that specific camera and then later get the full video.
I like body cams, video of all interactions with police (compare to the FBI refusing to record interviews because they believe handwritten notes are better), and similar ideas. But, at least with body cams, there are some questions with the point of view they end up presenting: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/body-cams-i... .
If placed over the bodycam, sure. There should be harsh penalties for officers who purposely obstruct the camera while actively on duty (I don't count a toilet break as "actively" on duty, so its ok to obstruct it while on a break, but there should be penalties for doing "police work" with the camera obstructed).
I don't think you add to this conversation. No I do not want to ban duct tape. But I still want a camera that is not possible for the officer to shut off without some procedure like radio in to dispatch and saying "all clear I am about to go take a pee can I get my camera turned off for a moment?". There is no need reason in this day and age for them to not be accountable. Yes an officer could still remove the camera, pick up a rock and smash it and probably take his tazer to it and just fry or many other ways I am suret but all that would have to be explained. Maybe they can explain it sometimes but it makes it harder.
