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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.

With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.

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I think the point is that if the footage is unsafe to release publicly, then it is also unsafe to give cops access without a warrant.

So cops need a warrant to even be present at a crime scene to ask the witness / victim what happened? Obviously not. And since not, why would they need a warrant to record their conversation with the witness / victim?

> Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public

If these controls don't exist inside the organization, they shouldn't exist for the public either.

I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.

But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.

Your best defense against this obvious attempt to obstruct justice is "but my penis may be exposed"? Really?

This community really turned around its stance on transparency and openness in the blink of an eye. It's baffling.

They the controls do exist, just not at the capacity required to do it for literally every single hour of footage recorded by body cameras. Hence why they do respond to requests for specific incidents but not blanket or bulk requests.

If they had to do this for all footage then the police department would likely respond by decreasing field officer counts to reduce footage, as well as shift resources away from law enforcement activities and towards redacting the massive volume of footage.

Are you saying that a child in the car with their DUI parent deserves to be on a YouTube bodycam channel because cops have to appear uncensored in the same video? I genuinely don't understand how you could mean anything else, and that makes me think I misunderstood. I sure hope I did.

NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.

The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day) Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally

The scaling problem of redacting video only applies to body cameras and I think they definitely aren't "going too far". Body cameras have greatly benefited society. The processes effectively restricting the rate at which you can file FOIA requests are entirely reasonable given the need to redact things to protect innocent people.

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