Hacker News Reader

Comment by songshu | Hacker News Reader

We need badge-equivalent cameras. What I mean is that we need to make cameras work the same way as badges and uniforms, in the sense that you just can't do police work if you don't have a working camera. A working camera has a red light on it which means that it is currently streaming (possibly buffering if temporarily out of wireless range).

The police don't have to record anything, they just need to stream somewhere with associated meta data. NGOs will come forward to read the streams and save them.

I understand it will be hard to get unions to agree to this and I don't have a solution, but I'm minded of the reforms made to policing in Northern Ireland as a success story.

View on HN

     you just can't do police work if you don't have a working camera

This is already becoming the policy in many forward thinking agencies.

    they just need to stream somewhere with associated meta data

There are real challenges, both technical and practical. Technically, you've got to worry about connectivity and battery life. Practically, somebody has to pay for it all! There's also many genuine use cases for turning off cameras during a shift, not the least of which is that officers have to use the bathroom just like the rest of us, but others like when talking to confidential informants or at the request of domestic abuse victims. None of these problems are insurmountable, but it's going to take time, energy, and money.

    I understand it will be hard to get unions to agree to this

That was true a few years ago, but now it's becoming very clear that the majority of decent officers want body cameras. They protect them individually and taxpayers against an endless stream of lawsuits. Google around: studies show that they work, very well, for reducing complaints and use-of-force incidents.

Disclaimer: I work on Axon body cameras in Seattle. If you (or anybody else!) are interested in writing code that will help put a camera and less-leathal weapon on every police officer, please email me: brandon@evidence.com

Thanks, that actually made me feel more optimistic about it, although I hadn't thought of the issues you raise. Keeping a camera charged and working shouldn't be harder than other maintenance already needed such as keeping a firearm clean or keeping a car on the road. If we refine the condition to "you can't appear in public or interact with the public without your camera" then the bathroom problem goes away. Connectivity and confidentiality are harder problems. Confidentiality in particular if it's the case that that's also where a lot of the corruption is.

There will be no singular panacea for corruption. However, I'd rather put a camera on every officer on their own terms now, rather than pray for them to magically cooperate with some all-or-nothing plan in the future. If nothing else, it will make a strict plan easier to move to later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com