> Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.
I do think people overstate the extent to which police violence in the US is a problem of evil cops committing wanton abuse as opposed to deeper systemic issues, but I think it's possible that bodycams end up being a useful piece of that puzzle.
As another commented pointed out downthread, you can hear them on accidentally-recorded video saying things like "We're still red here! Be careful!" when planting evidence/stealing stuff/whatever.
Disclaimer: I think both street protesters/identity politics activists and the police are basically run by assholes.
E.g. the cops can do lots of shady stuff that isn't a "use of force incident."
It's not just the incidents themselves, but the fact that the entire force seems to be quite willing to shield the worst offenders.
Sure, Office Steve probably won't knock me around because of my skin color, but how many times has he looked away while Officer John did?
That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.
Accountability is key.
I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it?
In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved.
Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.
Let's revise that estimate, though.
765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million.
At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year.
Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing officers. That's a billion dollars per year.
So I'll go with a cost estimate of 1.3 - 1.5 billion per year for cameras for all police officers.
Is that worth it? I think so.
Obviously there would be additional costs (memory cards, readers, batteries, chargers, harness, etc) but I don't see why it would come to more than $500-600 per person at most.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-09-24/police-wei...
No, they'll be buying tactical harnesses and military-tough specially cased relabeled $299 Go-Pros for $999 for each complete system, from a certified minority-owned business in partnership with Halliburton.
A camera won't become obsolete nearly as fast. Assuming the cops shoot in HD today (it would be really dumb if they didn't) then that will still be HD tomorrow. Maybe not 4k, but honestly I don't think 4k brings a lot to the table at this time in this application.
The data storage issue is definitely a concern, but I think it is one that can be effectively managed.
This statement requires justification.
>Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population.
>As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
Take a wild guess on what those have in common with police officers.
People that are constantly exposed to highly stressful situations tend to develop psychological problems.
>Police officers are almost entirely decent people . . .
Between 20% and 40% abuse their families. Does an entirely decent person abuse his family?
I'm not aware of a higher family abuse rate among EMTs, and a quick Google search produced nothing, so I'd appreciate any sources. Your reasoning makes sense, but I can just as easily say that violent people are more inclined to be police officers and soldiers - for obvious reasons. I'd guess it's some of both (some high stress and the attraction of the occupation to violent people).
Yes police officers have higher rates than the average, but you know who has higher than even those wife beating cops? Men that work in "demeaning jobs" or professions that are attributed traditionally to women like clerks, secretaries, teacher/classroom aides and maids/helpers.
The vast majority of those articles boil down to a handful of studies the one linked below is probably the most commonly referenced.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002....
And yes most police officers are decent and professional people, but there isn't such thing as being universally decent and any person is capable of the utmost indecency.
And you know what they say about so many intimate partner abuse cases? he/she was the nicest person in the world I would never think they would be capable of it....
People that abuse their partner more often than not do it as a release mechanism rather than their normal pattern of behaviour.
What is that based on?
It sort of barely controls for age, which finds lower violence when the officers are older.
But it's not very convincing. Anecdotally it seems like there is a domestic violence problem in the population, but you can't compare it to the general population. You need to control for education, background, and socioeconomic status.
Though, of course, the source itself may be making stronger claims…
I suspect police abuse is not as wide-spread as we've been led to believe by social justice marketing, but I'm open to evidence to the contrary. Let's put our engineers to work and get the costs of these camera systems way down, and then let's put them on every cop in the nation. It's not just the BLM folks talking about this, the MRAs also have claims about things like men who are physically abused by women, cop shows up, arrests the man anyways, and those sorts of stories. One way or the other we can put a number of social justice issues to rest.
It doesn't sound like you are "open to evidence to the contrary". Those words seem to dismiss such evidence.
2. There's a distinction between "debunked" and "claimed to be debunked"; you're conflating my meaning (the former) with the latter. If you did mean the former, then you're questioning all empiricism and objectivity, in which case we have no basis for discussion or reason and we may as well stop now.
should perhaps be
> Police officers are almost entirely almost decent people
The fact that the "few" (so we're told) bad apples aren't rooted out by their fellow honest, law-abiding officers suggests they're not as squeaky clean as some might think.
Note well: I am not saying that we should lower the standard of behavior that we expect police to abide by. I am merely saying that, in the real world, almost decent is probably the best we can actually find.
In the US people get shot for carrying a tiny razor blade...
You can train people to deescalate rather than shooting; to use minimal force; to remain calm while exercising force; to ask someone if they doing fine, while forcefully holding them to the ground. Or calmly explain to a hysterical individual being held down that things are going to be okay.
It takes training though.
These are not "decent people".
> These are not "decent people".
I really don't think it's that clear cut. The cops who turned their backs aren't all, necessarily, bad people. The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.
They respond to perceived attacks on interests in a similar way to what many subcultures do when they feel their interests are being encroached upon; they protest and grow more insular in solidarity.
This tends to lead to a bubble and allows otherwise decent people to, inadvertently or otherwise, overlook the shortcomings of "a few bad apples", in the interest of protecting people who they think have their best interests at heart.
I'm not saying this is good, it's just important to remember that cops are humans and behave like humans. Training is supposed to reduce the incidence of human misbehavior but I think that even just the fact that police wear uniforms tends to make them take the side of the "team" that they're representing.
Peer pressure or not, protesting accountability for your group after a member committed manslaughter is a bad act.
I believe they were protesting the generalizations he insinuated about the entire police department. I found it distasteful, but the good cops had a reason to be pissed.
Granted, that is an optimistic view.
If you are a cop and succumb to peer pressure to protect bad cops from the consequences of their actions, then I submit that you are also a bad cop.
We must hold the police to a higher standard than "they're just human; they can't help behaving this way".
Here's why:
https://preciseedit.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/in-my-opinion-i...
I have a friend in the NYPD, who did not turn his back on the mayor in that incident.
This problem needs to be solved from the top down. Police need to be constantly reminded that their job is more than just being enforcers.
Your co-worker didn't wank off to child porn at work with his workmates, I reckon. You cannot compare both situations.
You can get popped for CP just by downloading what you think isn't CP from a torrent client.
IMO you should only get arrested for CP if you are paying to access it, or producing it. As it is now, it's just a tool for the police to criminalize whoever they feel like.
There is actually something to this. It's the latest moral justification for around-the-law searches. Last few decades it was drugs. Police can pretty much search anyone if they reasonably believe they have drugs. This can get stretched into anything, such has having a few hundred bucks in cash. This means police can stop and search just about any car.
Next it was terrorism, so police can warranty search anyone or anything at airports, bus stations, train terminals, border crossings, just about anything. These powers aren't limited to terrorist activities either, but terrorism was the justification.
Now, computers yield more information that vehicles, so police need a way to extend their powers to search anyone's computer. Enter child porn.
As a general rule, anytime the government prohibits or extends their power "for the children," it's a huge red flag. Child porn fits into this category. It's hard to object to expansion of power to battle this too. I mean think of the children (ignoring their dystopian future).
Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience? Certainly my own experience with police has shaped my views far more than anything I've seen in the news.
> Or perhaps people arrive at their perceptions based on personal experience?
Probably also a factor, but that's also not representative and subject to perceptual biases.
One occurrence possibly. When it happens multiple times, I'm not inclined to attribute it to perceptual biases.
...who receive lots of back up from other police officers, superiors and the law.
What is this statement based on? Can you provide any data? What about people - whole communities in many places, over generations - who claim to be persecuted continuously by police. Are those people making it up? The people protesting in St Louis - what are they spending all that time and energy on if there is no problem?
This issue has been discussed heavily; I think more 'IMHOs' don't add to what we know about it.
I can't imagine it's less reliable than, say, the field of sociology. At any rate, the claims in the wikipedia article are well-sourced, so if they are false, it should be trivial to demonstrate as much.
> it's not evidence. That's just one incident in among claims by millions of people that have been going on for generations.
What you describe is evidence. It isn't proof. But your broader point stands--we need more data about this to know how prevalent it is. My only point is that it's not unprecedented for communities to lie--specifically your refutation ("it's been going on for generations") supports my pet theory, which is that a lot of historical oppression by police has turned many black communities against police, driving uncharitable interpretations of police behavior at best and outright slander (as in the Ferguson case) at worst. Note that these communities can be lying and not necessarily be bad people--slander is morally wrong, but it's also an understandable (though unjust, misguided, etc) response to oppression. Compassion and honesty aren't mutually exclusive, as we are often tempted to believe.
I assume you are white which is why you made that statement, I think a black person would have a different opinion.
A police department with frequent liability payouts can expect their premiums to be priced according to the risk they represent (assuming they are even able to find an insurer still willing to underwrite them).
Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much.
I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents.
Counter option: The DC cops are so brazen that they don't even care if they're being caught on film. This doesn't seem likely, since it would be such an easy payday for some hungry defense lawyer.