Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

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>> in jurisdictions where body-cam data is a matter of public record

Where is this mythical land, because many times people have to go to court to get a court order to release the footage, i would love to know where body cam footage is public record.

>>If the officer has a camera on the whole time, that potentially means the officer could use not just what they happened to see in the moment, but retroactively whatever can be seen in the footage after the fact, which likely significantly expands the extent of plain-view evidence that can be used without a warrant.

While an interesting topic, i dont believe this is in view of the context.

Further how many times does this issue really come up in the course of time. Seems like you are attempting to highlight edge cases in order to defend police corruption and their ability to hide their activities under the guise of public privacy.

Most of the body cam footage "lost" or "offline" is when the police are killing people in the plain outdoors in other public venue's not when they are protecting Grandma's privacy from the big bad public.

> Seems like you are attempting to highlight edge cases in order to defend police corruption and their ability to hide their activities under the guise of public privacy.

I'm not sure where you're getting that from what I wrote.

I'm not saying police shouldn't use bodycams (I explicitly said I think they're a net good). I think there might be specific circumstances where not recording might be appropriate (e.g., if they're inside someone's house). I think those circumstances, if they exist, should be determined as a matter of department policy, and not left to the whims of individual officers, and that in circumstances other than those, officers should have to be recording at all times, and there should be consequences if they don't. Things officers do in public would pretty obviously be examples of that.

The only thing I was pushing back on was the notion that it's universally the case that LEOs should need to have cameras on for every minute of ever shift.

> I think there might be specific circumstances where not recording might be appropriate (e.g., if they're inside someone's house).

On the other hand, though, I think being inside someone's house is when having a recording is the most critical. Without video recordings, it's just the officer's word against the defendant's, and courts will more often believe the officer's version of events.

Out in public, it's possible -- and in some places, likely -- that a concerned passerby would be recording what's going on, reducing the value of & need for the police body-cam video.

We should take a step back. The location of the recording doesn't matter so much (though sometimes it does matter). The bigger idea here is that some interactions between citizens and LEOs are private matters and not in the public's interest.

As an anecdote, when my friend was the victim of domestic violence, she confided her history with her abuser to an officer, and that officer gave her very individualized care. Whether their conversation happened inside a bedroom, at a front door step, or at a public park doesn't matter. My friend would not want her abuser, her estranged family members, or anyone else to a hold of the conversation she had with the officer.

I think the simple solution to this would be to treat the recording property of the primary subject, and/or owner of the property the recording was taken in. Instead of the traditional view that the person collecting the data / image is the owner. Which would place the choice to release the recording publicly to that person / company.

This goes to a larger point of data ownership as well, as one of the problems with the Google's and Facebook's of the world is the fact individuals have no ownership over the data collected about them. The EU has taken some steps to reverse this but holistically I think we need to look at data ownership as being owned by the person it is about not the person / company that collected it.

It seems to me that a recorded (by the body cam) statement requesting or consenting to the body cam being turned off should be sufficient in such cases.

I think that for recording cops effective it needs to be for their entire shift. Where needed we should address the privacy and 4th amendment concerns in legal updates.

Police get away with literally murder, and 4th amendment has soo many holes in it that police hardly need to look at their body cam when they can just say "hey I smell weed" or "did you hear that" to get in... So neither of them are something we should hold the roll out of body cams over

Body Cams have already caught cops planting evidence because they were not smart enough to know that when they turn it on it saves the last 3 mins of "off" time...

Body Cams are needed most urgently.

> Further how many times does this issue really come up in the course of time.

One possibly common case would be police officers operating on hospital grounds. Video taping patients who have not broken any laws is an enormous invasion of privacy.

Maybe there could be an independent review committee that reviews footage before release ensuring no impertinent PII is released. This, of course, would only work if the committee was _truly_ independent (i.e. commissioned for {x} years with a set budget by a higher level of government), and potentially would need to be anonymous in the event of a divisive case.

There are police officers who work full-time in a hospital. If they're wearing a body cam and recording constantly then they'd be producing 40 hours/week of footage. Considering that there may be multiple police officers in a similar role at a hospital and multiple hospitals in a city then how can any committee keep up with that?

You can just limit the review to footage that is being requested or used in accordance with a valid legal request and leave the rest in cold storage. If the footage is irrelevant to any legal proceedings then there is no reason for anybody to ever see it. Applied reasonably this would incur at most a modest multiplier on the current cost of a LEO or lawyer looking at it for their actual purposes.

This would really only work if a third party that didn't answer to local government or the police held the footage. Otherwise it is literally inevitable that you would have inappropriate access or politically motivated leaks.

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