Ferguson Riots

[Tibertus]

Yeah my comment about Russian dash cams was tongue in cheak, but there was a point. For one thing, dash cams have gotten cheap. You can get one with an attached monitor for under 80$ now. A body cam doesn't need to be a high Def go pro to be useful. Also dash cams use a rolling save feature where old footage is automatically erased, which could be useful for not only limiting how much personal information gets saved but also limits some logistics concerns. Also dash cams use a feature where if an accelerometer senses the forces associated with a collision it saves to hard memory the minutes leading up to and everything after. I imagine such a feature could be used in conjunction with a decibel sensing switch set to trip at the levels a gunshot would be at. I'm typing this all on my phone so I can't elaborate more on how body cams can be made more feasible, but it isn't like I haven't thought of the issues Austopio brought up. I just think the benefits of working it out are too big to ignore.

 

[Adorno]

Then what's to stop an officer from abusing his freedom to turn off the camera?

A policeman must always file a report whenever there's been an incident/arrest/shooting.
Should a person complain and there is no footage tied to the report,
then the policeman has failed to comply to the policy of recording any incident.

 

[Swadius 2.0]

Then what's to stop an officer from abusing his freedom to turn off the camera?

Some reminders that the camera is turned off can help alleviate the burden from the accuser. A beep the camera makes every 5 minutes when it's switched temporarily off when the officer has to use the loo or something makes it very hard for people to believe that this officer just forgot that he switched the thing off for his entire run.

 

[Orion]

A policeman must always file a report whenever there's been an incident/arrest/shooting.
Should a person complain and there is no footage tied to the report,
then the policeman has failed to comply to the policy of recording any incident.

Well the obvious question then is how does a person prove there was an incident? It's their word against the officer's when there's nothing to back it up, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how that will go.

I think Tib's onto something about bodycams with rolling saves. Lots of commercially available surveillance cameras do that already, and with the increasing capacity of flash memory it isn't crazy to think a little bodycam could hold a few days' worth of footage. It doesn't have to be high res stuff because it doesn't have to be for identification purposes, it just needs to capture audio and show who hit first. Really, it would only exist to prove the officer followed procedure and acted in accordance with the law. It's more about keeping tabs on the cops than on civilians.

Timestamps on the video would help identify odd breaks in recording. If a cop goes into a bathroom at 3:15 and the camera doesn't come back on until 4:30 then that's suspicious. The problem is catching it in the first place, because somebody would have to review the footage before it's overwritten. If a new video file is made every time the camera is turned on (which is standard, I think) then it wouldn't be hard to check the timestamps at the end of one clip and the beginning of the next I suppose, and as long as they're kept at the station and access to them is logged then it would be difficult to tamper with the videos. It's greater workload on already understaffed departments, but the advantages for single officer patrols can't be ignored.

Of course there's really nothing stopping an officer from abusing it if they really wanted to, but that's how everything is here in the US I suppose.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Making the police wear more gadgets and turning them into cameramen makes it seem as if they are reprehensible people who are hired through ads in the back of Guns and Ammo magazine. Either make them patrol in pairs or don't do anything because the next brilliant idea will be to have the solo police cameraman shooting big nets at perpetrators and instead of a regular gun he'll be issued a rifle with tranquilizer darts.

The kind of people who riot before they even know what happened won't be fazed by video recordings anyway, they'll just claim the video was faked.

 

[Adorno]

A policeman must always file a report whenever there's been an incident/arrest/shooting.
Should a person complain and there is no footage tied to the report,
then the policeman has failed to comply to the policy of recording any incident.

Well the obvious question then is how does a person prove there was an incident? It's their word against the officer's when there's nothing to back it up, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how that will go.

Well, if the police doesn't even report incidents - in other words: document their work - then corruption is rampant.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

The kind of people who riot before they even know what happened won't be fazed by video recordings anyway, they'll just claim the video was faked.

They won't be fazed, but they will end up properly charged and in jail.

 

[Orion]

Well, if the police doesn't even report incidents - in other words: document their work - then corruption is rampant.

The original question was: "what's to stop an officer from abusing their freedom to turn off their camera?" An officer who has the presence of mind to turn off their camera before doing sketchy **** may have the creativity to falsify a report. Unless there's proof from somewhere then it's just one person's word against another's.

 

[Swadius 2.0]

Of course there's really nothing stopping an officer from abusing it if they really wanted to, but that's how everything is here in the US I suppose.

Do you perceive that to be different elsewhere?

 

[Tibertus]

Well, as I stated earlier, I've always thought of body cams as more of protection for officers. It'll protect good officers from false charges. Sure there will be cops who abuse the system very badly, but there have been quite a few cops who have done dumb **** in front of their squad car cam, so likely body cams will help take down at least a few dumb bully cops.

 

[Orion]

Do you perceive that to be different elsewhere?

I don't pretend to know.

Well, as I stated earlier, I've always thought of body cams as more of protection for officers. It'll protect good officers from false charges.

That's what they would be best used for, but that's not how they could be pitched to the public right now. The media would have a field day if body cams were being issued with the intention to protect officers from false charges because it would be interpreted (regardless of how correct it may be) as official support of the officer in Ferguson.

 

[Tibertus]

At the very least they should be allowe'd as personal equipment. Many officers wear personal vests and sidearms.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Do you perceive that to be different elsewhere?

I don't pretend to know.

Well, as I stated earlier, I've always thought of body cams as more of protection for officers. It'll protect good officers from false charges.

That's what they would be best used for, but that's not how they could be pitched to the public right now. The media would have a field day if body cams were being issued with the intention to protect officers from false charges because it would be interpreted (regardless of how correct it may be) as official support of the officer in Ferguson.

The president just pitched the idea of having police wear more cameras, probably as a way of protecting the public from the police since he can't be accused of offering any support at all for the police in this case.

Suggesting that they need more cameras is just another way of blaming the police for the bad behavior of someone who should have cooperated with the cop instead of attacking him.

 

[QuailLover]

In California, several PDs issue body cameras/or are highly encouraged.

Even my security guard company issues them to us. Which helped me out when an ESPN producer threatened to sue me for towing her vehicle.

 

[Orion]

The president just pitched the idea of having police wear more cameras, probably as a way of protecting the public from the police since he can't be accused of offering any support at all for the police in this case.

Oh I am certainly aware of the proposal for 50,000 new bodycams for police. I just said it would be unwise to say it was to protect police against false accusations (for the reason you gave, in bold), even if that's what they would mostly be used for in practice, because it's inevitable that the media would see it as support of the police in Ferguson.

 

[Austupaio]

Several months later... here we are again.

Shots have been fired at police officers from various areas around the city, attackers are using rifles from a distance. At least one officer has been hit and killed, all other information is really sketchy because this is in progress.

 

[Krik]

What city, Ferguson again?

 

[Austupaio]

Yep, s'why I revived this. Police are mobilizing and it's possible the National Guard is preparing to lock down the city too.

 

[AWdeV]

More like, nuktional guard. As in, nuke 'em.

 

[Tibertus]

**** that place. The protesters are mostly ****ty, or at least don't mind the ****ty people being the most public and visible. Michael Brown was a ****ty person, and while he maybe didn't need to be shot, I don't really feel remorse for him. The police department isn't much better, because the entire city of Ferguson seems to breed ****ty people.