In California, a Champion for Police Cameras

I agree, but I don't think this obviates the need for regular citizens' videotaping the police. If surveillance is going to be omnipresent, I think it's crucial that regular people are able to present their viewpoints as well.

If we rely solely on the recordings that are produced by the powerful, it seems all too likely that things will be presented out of context, recordings will be 'lost', etc

I think the initial sense of disapproval comes from the connotation we usually associate with cameras: things that watch us in order to regulate our behavior.

But in this case, it is the cops who are being watched. As you note, "any interaction that occurs off camera" will be suspicious...aficionados of irony can recognize how this turns the cop-favorite-notion of "if you're doing nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?"

And the digital/systematic nature of the cameras' operation makes it even more pervasive to the officer. It's not just what you saw, but...why were you looking there, of all places? Why is your camera off during a time that you're supposed to have it on?

One thing I would've liked to see in the OP is to know the change in absolute number of officer initiated stops. If you know you have this extra layer of scrutiny to deal with, you may decide to not harass someone who is just barely breaking the law.

There are a few other situations in which the privacy of citizens is at risk with this tech. As the article notes:

Privacy advocates worry that video of police officers searching a suspect’s home could end up on the evening news.

But I agree with the ACLU, as quoted later in the article, that:

“[The cameras] do raise privacy concerns, but ones that can be addressed by strong privacy policies.”

I nevertheless agree that on-duty police officers should have no expectation of privacy except in cases of undercover work. And frankly, with the multitude of undercover operations that border on entrapment, maybe those operations need to be documented better as well.

Still though this is not a checks and balances approach. It's a covering you butt approach. True reform would include third party oversight, not just internal investigations.

I anticipate allowing undercover cops to go unrecorded will prompt police departments to make all cops undercover. To better serve the public of course.

I think any authority that accepts money from the public should be obligated to surveil themselves. Not just cops, but federal, state, and local regulators as well. What you do on the public's dime should be publicly available, with an API to your speech and location.

As long as those video feeds get stored by someone else than the police, or at least that police department, otherwise certain video feeds could easily be "misplaced" or "corrupted".

I'm wondering out loud, what would the repercussions, from a behavioral standpoint be, if everyone wore something like google glass. Would almost everyone turn into "law"-abiding persons? Would that even be desirable? I'm sure drunk, or otherwise in an altered state of mind, people would still act quite unruly. But what would the effect be on regular people? Would it be mostly chilling, or a kind of werdly pleasant place where people act nice because getting away with "unlawful behavior" would be much more difficult? Gone would be some adolescent rites of passage...

It could become the ultimate case of people policing each other (in the sinister neighborhood watch committees sense --ala Cuba, Vietnam, etc.)

I was in traffic court last week and a guy was there fighting a ticket he got for impeding traffic. According to the cop, the guy was stopped in the middle of the road and did not pull off the road when asked.

According to the guy, he was stopped because there was traffic in front of him, and pulled over after the light turned green and the cars blocking him in cleared out.

The guy (a casually dressed minority with tattoos all over his arms and neck) seemed frustrated as hell when all the cop did was was to simply tell the judge "I didn't see anyone in front of him" over and over as the guy tried to explain his side of the story. The ruling: guilty as charged.

I don't know what the truth was, but it sure would have been nice if there was videotape to see who was lying. As it was, it was the cop's word against the word of a guy who looked like it would be all to easy to declare him guilty.

I'm most interested in the application to SWAT teams and how that will or won't impact their increasing militarization and general overuse of force. It'll be interesting to see how much resistance there is (I'd expect a lot) to making SWAT teams wear them.

As long as citizens have a right to un-tampered feeds from their own cameras, too.

I think the "corrected" title works fine, actually. The point of the article is not just that complaints declined (though that may be the point you care about the most)...the point is that even though cameras are credited for this improvement, larger (more politically known) police departments are opposing it, for various reasons.

I was really surprised to see that Bloomberg opposed it. Yes, the startup cost is high, but it seems like it'd be offset by the decline in fighting lawsuits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/nyregion/order-that-police...

> But when Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled on Monday that the city’s stop-and-frisk program was unconstitutional and ordered that police officers in certain precincts strap tiny cameras to their uniforms to record their dealings with the public, Mr. Bloomberg’s response was immediate and emphatic. > > “It would be a nightmare,” he said. “We can’t have your cameraman follow you around and film things without people questioning whether they deliberately chose an angle, whether they got the whole picture in.”

Um, just like you can't have cops carry guns because you'll have people questioning whether they were right to shoot and kill someone? Strange reasoning from the mayor.

The original I'm seeing on NYT is "In California, a Champion for Police Cameras".

From a UI/UX standpoint, it might let the officers feel more in control, but manual activation makes the system much more prone to error. I think it would be best to have constant activation.

This reminds me of the controversy that happened when the CIA videotaped "enhanced interrogation techniques" and 90 of the videos got mysteriously destroyed. Noone was ever held criminally responsible for that [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_d...

There's a definite need that the video should be streamed as backup to a department (or more neutral 3rd party) database or made incapable of being deleted.

It also ha the benefit of making citizens act better as well. The article said it's basically a win, win situation. The only people that would be against this are corrupt cops and their overlords (i.e. Bloomberg).

If officer recording becomes the norm though, an "accidentally" deleted recording is going to be viewed with a lot of suspicion by the courts and is going to put a lot more weight onto any testimony against you.

I doubt there's any chance of that, I outlined the reasons here, in response to someone who noted they budget 150 rounds per year for practice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6187591

The police are the executors of the state's monopoly on the use of force, and where a state exists by the consent of the governed, it is uniquely important that the police are, without exception, held responsible to the people.

Any philosophy allowing unlimited or arbitrary state power over individuals turns the state, is one where the state, rather than the people, has full liberty, and is the master. That's the historical status quo (sans Greece, Rome) prior to liberalism, Locke.

I think the key is that filming on the job is different from accessing all non-professional information. I fully expect police departments to monitor officer emails if there is suspected mis-use. I don't see how these cameras are different.

I assume that the video is only really reviewed in the event of complaint or when needed for evidence. Unless the goal starts to be to catch everyone all the time for everything.

Isn't that the issue with automatic red-light cameras, and automated radar cameras?

That is, we (as a society) have set penalties for infractions that are really high based on the danger of those infractions. We didn't have enough patrol cars or cops to enforce every stop light or speed limit, so we made the penalties quite high because of the low probability of getting caught.

We must revisit all penalties if universal enforcement gets into place.

There is a subtlety here that helps defendants with competent lawyers. The police and prosecutors will be more than happy to show video evidence in court when it justifies police actions -- it is pretty hard to raise doubts about the claim that a suspect charged at the police with a knife when the police have a video of it happening. When the police show up in court and claim to have forgotten to turn their cameras on, the defense gets a big boost -- "Convenient that you forgot to turn the camera on just before beating my client into a coma, yet you did not fail to turn it on in your previous 30 arrests."

I think "Rodney King 2.0" angle is being terribly unfair to the police, even though I so happen to find the police actions there deplorable.

Those police officers were making a proper stop of a fleeing suspect. But they lost control of the situation, both the suspect and their own emotions, and could not think of anything better than to keep increasing the level of force applied when their previous application of force failed.

IMO, their failure is we expect police officers to behave more like human beings and less like automatons. But they did not intend to put anyone in the hospital/morgue when they stepped out of their squad cars.

Cameras might have saved Rodney King such a severe beating precisely because those officers would have turned on their cameras, since their initial intentions were proper. What the cameras would have done is put every officer on notice that their actions would be closely scrutinized, after the fact. They probably would have behaved better, if that were the case.

I imagine most of the behavior changes are from that, if you know you're being recorded then you're going to act better overall because it's going to be hard to lie later when the film disproves you.

I would have to say it comes from the officers behaving more "by the book" since they know they are being videotaped.

How do you measure that though?

That's borderline impossible to measure. If there was a better way than courts to determine guilt or innocence (so that the result of the trial could be compared to the truth), it would be atrocious not to use that way instead of the courts.

Yes, this is the way that customer call centers can monitor the performance of their own employees.

In many states it is illegal to record a conversation unless all parties of the conversation have knowledge of the recording (and thus give implied consent).

Some folks use dash cams for this purpose.

If by privacy concerns, you mean "We don't want our mistakes made public". In this case, the running over of a crash victim from Asiana flight 214 that crashed at SFO recently.

Use of force is a hot button issue, but both police and fire personnel have a lot of critical situations where not adhering to safety procedures can get someone hurt or killed. Once you get past use of force, there are more similarities than differences.

The police should be spending their time in public places, and their actions should be open to scrutiny by the public. If the police enter a private home with a warrant, privacy concerns have already been addressed by the warrant. As long as the system for cataloging and accessing the videos is open source and available for the public to scrutinize (and to check for ways it might be used beyond auditing the police themselves), where do you see a privacy problem?

Actually, rather than a violation of privacy, this may be a great victory for accountability. I say this because I do not believe that anyone expects privacy for an action that they perform within the sight of a cop: if a cop is there, you can assume he will see you, it's kind of silly to think otherwise.

However, what it does do is provide accountability. It is no longer a matter of "the cop vs the criminal", now, in court, there will be video evidence for what actually happened. For law abiding citizens, there will be no difference, for the cops, it will mean that they will be forced to provide reasons for and accurate accounts of all their actions. This does not violate privacy, it protects the innocent from the wrong doings of thugs in cop uniforms. (not saying all cops are like this, most aren't, but there's always a few bad apples)

How is it a crime against privacy? The police are Constitutionally-authorized to enter your home with a warrant, arrest you, take down all your information, etc. Having or not having a camera affects nothing, except that sometimes, a camera is more accurate in recording details that could be important in the prosecution and defense of the case.

Perhaps you have a visceral reaction to the thought of things being visually captured by the government? You should read up on what happens when a dead body is found in a home.