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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

This is another example of "an untested backup doesn't exist", as well.

Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage, if you treat your body cams as a backup -- and only look at it when something goes wrong -- you're going to discover that your body cams weren't working all along and no one noticed.

And then you're going to look hella guilty of hiding evidence, even if it was just bad IT policies & procedures.

If you have body cameras, you need a process where you frequently, randomly pull the footage from random officers, and check whether it was turned on, recording properly, filed correctly, whether the camera quality is uselessly grainy, etc etc etc.

Otherwise, just like you don't have backups if you aren't testing your restore process, you'll find out you don't have body camera footage even when it would clear you of blame.

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To my knowledge this is managed by the body cam vendors with the kinds of protections/assurances you would expect for something that will need to pass evidentiary chain of custody, etc for something to withstand scrutiny in court:

https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-th...

Almost kind of funny it uses the Axon-provided cloud at evidence.com. Not kidding.

What this boils down to: if the camera footage has been altered or is unavailable some shady cop/department went out of their way to do so. The workflow is extremely simple: hit the record button when you interact with the public, dock the camera (needs to charge anyway) at the end of your shift. There should be no wiggle room for excuses.

The vendors have packaged all of this up decently and something like "Oops we deleted that" should never be acceptable. Even the pre-record activation rolling buffer should eliminate nearly any "We missed that because I didn't have time to activate record" scenarios other than maybe "someone ran up on me out of nowhere and started shooting/attacking me".

Oh you "forgot" to press a button when you pulled someone over? You shouldn't be a cop, plain and simple.

(disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Axon)

It’s also worth noting that recording can be activated wirelessly by various triggers. The most obvious and common one being that a nearby officer’s camera was activated (either by physically pressing the button or via a chain reaction of wireless activations).

Depending on the available hardware/accessories & configuration, other sources of activation can include unholstering a weapon, aiming or discharging a taser, by computer aided dispatch, unlocking a weapon in the vehicle, activating the light bar, high vehicle speed, running, falling, crashing, and more.

In my opinion, if multiple officers are on the scene at least one axon recording device each: there is either video evidence or willful suppression of evidence. It’s that simple.

Publicly sharing hashes of video segments as they're created, would validate both the existence of, and unaltered nature of the video.

This is one of the few good use cases for a blockchain outside of crypto

Why is there a button at all? Record everything all the time. Sort it out later. The vast majority of it will be useless footage, but so what?

If I was a cop I would certainly want every donut I eat to be recorded if it also means there is no change I get falsely accused of improper interaction with the public. 99.9% of the time no one will look at my donut footage.

I believe it would be acceptable for the camera to be turned off when the police officer steps into a bathroom during a break to use the facilities.

OK, fair. But should still be default on.

>Regardless of whether some of the time, a police department is full of bad apples and concealing or destroying body-cam footage

Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage.

Also, make it so that if a cop is accused of violating rights or involved in foul play, and their body cam "suddenly malfunctioned or were turned off or was left in the car" , a default judgement is given against the officer in question.

Make it as ubiquitous to cops as a parachute is for someone who goes skydiving. This must be enforced as harshly as possible. Cops aren't operating on their own dime.

If I'm a cop and the choice is leave my camera on or lose my job, my union membership, my retirement, my pension, and also face serious jail time, I'm leaving my camera on every time.

The watchers MUST watch the watchmen, and the watchmen must have no expectations of privacy while on duty or being paid by the public.

> Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage.

Destroying evidence of a crime is already a felony.

Conceal is a tricky one though as depending on placement the camera could definitely be obscured by normal day to day action (like a tussle). But again, if it can shown the action was deliberate, it’d be an action in furtherance of a crime.

The suggestion I've seen is to legislate changing the presumption such that if body camera footage is missing then it should be presumed to be foul play unless the police department can show evidence otherwise.

While I agree with what you say for the most part, it's not a question of "what rules can we add on top of the existing structure?". Which is why simply adding bodycams has been so ineffective. We're only really going to be safe from cops by essentially nuking the entire system and starting over.

The core issue is that cops are far less vulnerable to prosecution or even non-legal accountability than almost any other citizens. Largely this is due to police unions. In addition to the structural inertia, there's cultural inertia - cops don't want to hold each other accountable either.

This is why people talk about reforming police from the ground up. It's actually easier than "fixing" the current system, which actively fights against accountability.

There one but 1 reform that will do the most... Putting an end to the moronic judicial created doctrine of "Qualified Immunity"

it is very sad that we had the opportunity to do so in 2020, with both Democrat and Republican Support, but that opportunity was wasted by using that political interia and capital on the moronic "De fund the police" mantra's where by the new status quo seems to be "Well if the police act like criminals lets to all be criminals and never arrest anyone for anything"....

"Qualified Immunity" is one of the Root Causes of the policing problem, and it needs to end

> Make it a felony to conceal or destroy body cam footage.

You mean it's not a felony to destroy evidence?

In theory, it is. In practice, prosecutors are very reluctant to go after cops for such type of crimes, or for any others that relate to their professional functions - perjury, excessive force, evidence tampering, violating disclosure rules, unlawful searches, etc. Plus, there's qualified immunity thing, which makes it very hard to gain a successful conviction even if the prosecutor is willing. It'll take a big SCOTUS decision dismantling that construct to start seeing any change there, and that may take a long while to happen.

This can be completely automated though. Noone has to watch any footage unless the system feels like something is wrong with it.

And that could be in conjunction with the involved party.

Seems like good policy to randomly pull bodycam footage on a continuous basis for performance evaluation purposes.

The article talks about how New Orleans (under Federal consent decree) would evaluate the constitutionality of police stops.

Absolutely agree with the analogy. And I'll just say regarding backups that I really like this shorter formulation: "An untested backup is not." Oh and I recall also hearing "If you're not gonna bother with testing it, then whatever you already have is good enough"

Seems like a good idea from QC perspective. Large departments will need to hire additional staff to do the QC checks, but that's not a major hurdle.

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