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Comment by hbarka | Hacker News Reader

And guess who does the selection bias on the on/off button.

This only matters if you assume malicious intent. I'm not saying it isn't ever there, but let's not pretend it's proven to be statistically significant.

Malicious intent must be assumed. The body cameras exist in order to be a deterrent to malicious police behaviors and as such any system which puts the officers in charge of the functioning of the cameras, and which does not heavily discourage or prevent police from operating with a broken or malfunctioning camera is failing in its primary mission. It should be illegal for an officer to operate or be on duty with a broken or otherwise non-functioning body camera, and the footage from body cameras should be held by an independent third party that is not subject to oversight or control by the police (FBI might not be a bad idea).

Ironic, given that a core tenant of our justice system is "innocent until proven guilty".

All of the things you mention are "wishlist" items right now.

Lets assume this is true (and honestly, I'd love for it to be true).

>It should be illegal for an officer to operate or be on duty with a broken or otherwise non-functioning body camera

So now that you have that law, how do you enforce it?

How does a department verify that they're complying?

How does any individual officer know whether his camera is working or malfunctioning?

How do they correct the problem if it's a technically complex issue related to camera infrastructure or hardware?

How much additional burden does this place on each department?

How do those departments pay for that added burden?

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So can we put a system in place that satisfies your very high standard? Almost certainly yes.

Should we? I don't know.

Will we? Almost certainly not. At least not in the immediate future. It's expensive and hard.

Sorry for the irrelevant response but: s/tenant/tenet/

Not just you, I recently read “All information should be free” was a core tenant of the hacker culture at MIT.[0] Don't tell me it's becoming proper English!

A tenant is a person who holds lands; a tenet is something held to be true. I didn't realize until learning Spanish that ten and tain in English words means to have/hold! Their verb 'to have' is tener (Latin: tenere). Maintain is mantener; also there's contener, detener, obtener, retener, sostener...

[0] http://ctankersley.com/2017/01/04/the-history-of-open-source...

Obviously there's the question of how foolproof you want the system to be, but at a minimum there should be some system that monitors and confirms it's receiving at least a heartbeat signal from the camera and that the camera is reporting normal functioning. If the camera drops out police dispatch should be notified who in turn should notify the officer that he needs to return to the station to have his camera replaced. One possibly more passive solution that others have mentioned is to simply discount any testimony an officer provides that doesn't have an operating camera to corroborate his statements and instead defer to non-law enforcement testimony in those cases instead of the current situation where an officer is always considered more trustworthy than anyone else. That provides very strong incentive for police to insure their cameras are working because in the event they aren't any testimony they provide would be more or less nullified and likely lose them cases.

This is like a nightmare scenario. Criminal testimony should be given more weight than the police? Madness.

I agree an independent body should own the audit process. It's a common sense best practice. What I'm saying is, I don't think we'll find it makes a significant difference. Most cops are trying to do a good job and keep our streets safe and will not be "deterred" from any specific behavior. When mistakes do happen, we'll continue to judge actions in a court of public opinion, where all are guilty until proven innocent.

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