Also, you could probably file a suit to get the unredacted video, and you could make a big stink about this. That's how you get to the next step.

Then it comes down to jamming, tampering, malfunction, sabotage, and any misbehavior that otherwise prevents useful recordings, since we’re talking about wearables that can be covered, discarded and left behind, even if thy can’t be turned off. But if it does get recorded, it needs to get locked up tighter than handcuffs.

That video needs to dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Another thought is the panopticon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon . You don't necessarily need to stream and record every cop's cam, just randomize it without indicating to the cops who's getting recorded or when.

As someone who has been falsely accused by an officer (fortunately a minor traffic violation that I was able to make go away by paying a small fine), I've lost any faith that officers are there to serve their constituents.

That principle is not in contradiction with the principle that power must be held accountable.

Historically, that's why public figures are called "public" in opposition to "private".

There would still be lots of details to get right, but at least it wouldn't violate the basic underlying principles of our legal system.

But then this comes down to a jury, and most Americans still seem to trust their police officers. Just saying..

When cops' word weighs more than yours in a court of law, this requires an equivalent check against that power by only making it weigh that much when there is corroborating evidence (i.e., video proof).

Everything is at some point the fault of the police. It seems like everyone wants the police to do only what they want them to and to be punished if the police do something different.

Now I don't come from the US so can't comment on the problems with the police there and I don't know how the police there are funded but I know from my country that some of the "solutions" stated to hold the police to account would bankrupt the police here, but then I suppose that's the fault of the police as well.

I'm all for bodycams though because at the end of the day when a fabricated complaint comes in (my experience is most of them are) then these can be easily dismissed and hopefully those people actually held to account.

In the long term, this leads to a fundamentally adversarial and extractive relationship between the police and the populace, and the situation right now where police are widely hated, or at least distrusted, by significant sections of the population.

The solution to all of this is to break this extractive relationship: To prevent the police from profiting from the enforcement of some laws over others, or from seizing property only to sell it for their own gain. And, yes, to accept a rate of general taxation and redistribution that can be used to fund the institutions of a modern state. So long as the US continues to pursue the current tax model, the same shortfalls and perverse incentives to find alternative sources of revenue with exist, leading to the same poor outcomes in so many areas of government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

Many places in the US don't have these problems, so there is nothing to solve.

Currently the police are savagely being under funded as are all public sectors and crime is on the rise but the difference between the police and other public services is that people seem to understand why the other public services are not performing as good as they were, but it's the fault to the police they aren't performing as good.

Like I said I would love to see bodycams on all police but as with every public body ICT project it will be mismanaged and cost way more than it needs to. Currently the police where I am can't afford it.

(0) Their pension plans are underfunded, but those plans are rediculous compared to private sector plans.

Why is it hateful to the police to actually ask for their interactions? As the modern authoritarian state asks its citizens, what do you have to hide?

I'm all from transparency, not only does it keep the cops right but it also means cops are safe from fabricated complaints they are subject to. I just find some of the ideas here about how to do this ridiculous from a reality perspective. And to suggest that the police should be presumed guilty it actually worse than ridiculous.

It seems people want police to be johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to cracking down on crime immediately while simultaneously exercising extreme discretion and self-control when it comes to respecting legal rights and responsibilities.

I'm not sure who could even fulfill those kinds of expectations but it would be someone like a grizzled experienced prosecutor who has defense lawyer experience who is in good physical condition and is physically well trained.

I doubt the pool of people who meet those criteria are willing to work for police salaries.

You're trying to solve a legal problem with technology. That's dangerous, because it's hard upper limit is the technology's long-term security. Even worse, it's real upper limit is the min(technology, law)

Make sure that the people who are responsible for the decryption and delivery of the content have incitement that the result is useful.

Depends really. Moving to a different country would be my next step personally.

Desth rate statistics don't do justice to the looming threat of a group/tribe/clan/haggle of people who are out to just kill out-group people no matter what. I'm not concerned much about the risk itself, but I am about what it does to civic life.

Nonsense. Cameras will be always used to benefit only the police as long as they control them: it's easy to cherry-pick what to record and, later on, what to release. It's easy to take off a camera altogether.

You need 3rd parties (e.g. bystanders) to be able to record what's happening and stream it it safe storage in real time.

It's sad that you're being downvoted for saying this, because it's true. As long as police are the only ones legally or practically empowered to film these encounters, they will be the ones empowered to control the narrative.

The right of citizens to film police encounters without harassment or threats is imperative.

I don't have direct experience, but I'd bet Taser doesn't let podunk police departments really "erase" video. And given the volume, you'd think it's got to be built on AWS or another big cloud provider, with pretty good forensic tools.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/business/taser-internatio...

The NYTimes article you posted hints at an uncomfortably cozy relationship between Taser, law enforcement and local governments...

    Yet as Taser works to sell cameras and software to more departments, 
    it is coming under fire for questionable business practices. In some
    instances, it has paid police chiefs to travel to Taser conferences. 

    In other cases, chiefs who have bought Taser products have joined 
    the company as consultants shortly after leaving public service. 
    And several cities have awarded contracts to Taser without 
    competitive bidding.

It is probably easy for a records clerk to export redacted video, but should be hard for them to really delete video, or tamper without leaving a trail.

Some customers might justify the risk, I suppose. But if they were to regularly winkwink at cops deleting video evidence, they'd get walloped.

They will if they want to keep getting contracts.

In the absence of laws requiring full transparency and access to body cam footage, the body cams are just likely to be abused.

Missing audio and a big "redacted" sticker is a pretty damning evidence that "Something" was removed. IF there was nothing to hide, why did they remove it?

In the process, you destroy the evidence exonerating them, i. e. footprints of shoes much smaller than theirs.

Obstruction of justice? Nope.

Now imagine the same thing happened. Except that this time, you include their lawn not just because you always do, but to get them thrown in jail. You're really tired of doing all these chores for them, and it's time for new neighbours.

Obstruction of justice? Yep.

Intend matters.

1. If I have my phone on and recording, the police can seize it (ie, grab it from me). At best, I'd be able to turn it off, but it's been shown multiple times that they can force me to provide my fingerprint to unlock it.

2. If I turn my phone off (so they need my pin, which they can't force from me), I can't record.

The phone is encrypted - but the battery isn't removable, and I assume there's more than one way to get at the data as long as the phone stays on (usb/pin header access, some form of cold boot attack, kernel 0day).

I seem to recall the iPhone used to be similar wrt using the camera on a locked device - you can disable the touch id and enable a more secure pin? (although, if it's still possible to brute force the hsm, going to a "secure" number of digits isn't really practical. But six digits with three attempts before actually hardware enforced cool down should help a bit. But even at just 1 guesses / 3 seconds on average, it'd at worst take a month (15 days on average) to get into such a device, assuming an automated/robot brute force toolkit - especially with faulty tamper resistant hw).

Even if you do prove they stopped you from recording, so what? You don't have evidence of your interaction to implicate them. As long as they recite the magical words, that they believed they were in the right, current legal doctrine will look the other way(see Heien vs North Carolina - https://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/12/16/heien-v-north-carol... - and similar).

You just start recording them, and then if they try to stop you, their attempt to stop you is now recorded, and hopefully in the cloud where they can't delete it.

Did they beat you up, refuse to help you, or something like that?

I’ll explain it like this...I felt revictimized. In my estimation four officers spent their time questioning me instead of any resources attempting to locate the gunman actively getting away in my car.

The truth is even being forced to drive my attacker at gun point for approximately 25 minutes, I felt some degree of control in the sense I had some power to make a decision even as bad as all of the available options were pretty bad. At some point after exhausting everything I could think of to negotiate myself out of the situation safely (i.e. please just let me out and take my phone and wallet; I’m a lawyer maybe I can help you, you don’t need to do this), I accepted that very likely what was going on is I was being forced to drive to an isolated location where I would be shot and my body wouldn’t be found.

Accepting something like that as reality is actually empowering - and I even testified to this - I considered driving my car into a concrete median on the highway at high speed; making a move to grab the gun and fight; I considered driving my car off the shoulder of the highway down a grassy hill and trying to roll out. And these were very real possibilities and options I could have attempted thinking at least if I lived I would get medical treatment quickly if this happened on I-95 and he would likely get caught...which I felt was unlikely if I allowed the entire thing to play out in some isolated location. At the end the gunman forced me to exit the highway and I made my move when being directed to do a u-turn at an intersection.

So you have to consider I’m not trained for any of this, but still I felt somewhat in control in the sense that I could make a choice. And when I escaped I felt some degree of elation, because of all my options I ended up picking one that got me away from a gunman relatively unharmed physically considering. But then I felt instead of pursing this gunman who was making an active get away in my car there were 4 officers busy questioning me the most senior of them setting the tone for the rest by basically telling me I’m full of shit before even speaking with me. I felt more victimized than with the gunman, because the reality was I had no options, I had no recourse, and in my mind their own bias ensured this guy would safely make a get away in my car (which he did). So based on nothing more than how the one officer treated me I felt more victimized by them than the gunman, because I actually had less power.

I went from feeling I made the right choice by escaping, to thinking I did the wrong thing and that what I should have done is try to fight and take the gun...godforbid something like this ever takes place again, it is very likely I will take that option, knowing full well life isn’t some movie where the good guy always wins.

And it’s not just about me but about the next victim and how they are treated, maybe it’s a woman escaping a sexually motivated attacker and this officer asking why she is dressed so provocatively if she didn’t want it. Chilling effects are real, and telling a victim they are lying as the first words out of your mouth while showing zero interest in pursuing the suspect making an active getaway from the scene sets the tone. Then again it was this slight (perceived or not) that resulted in me locating the suspect with 24 hours, even with a location from a stolen iPad there was an initial refusal for the police to go to the location, it was me who drove to the location and confirmed my vehicle location and the gunman, and that burden really should not have been on me, I should have felt confident the police would find this guy especially when I provided them with a location from my iPad that happened to be in the car. So you tell me, did they refuse to help me?

One reason is that the police department thought it mattered.

You'd better believe it matters when they come after you for (say) making false statements to the police, and it's their word against yours, and the court always sides with the cops.

I don't understand your point at all about "tainting evidence" and how that could possibly follow from brusque questioning.

Once you start deferring to police officers' immediate judgement, the legal process is tainted to amplify every single stereotype police officers hold.

White victims will obviously be treated with more deference than blacks, Spanish-speaking people will all be assumed to be illegal immigrants etc.

So the young man accused of something will be "brusquely questioned" within the first minutes and confess to the crime. While the old woman is treated with deference, has a chance to talk to a lawyer, and never gets convicted.

And the worst thing is the spiral, self-amplifying nature: start like that, and the sort of people already suspect will be the only ones actually being charged with crimes and convicted, which will reinforce all the ideas the process started out with.

I am sure they do, that does not mean 70% of people are lying. Just means they are bullied into changing their story to appease the cops.

90% of all cases end in a plea bargain or other guilty/no-contest finding outside of a trial, do you honestly believe the police are that good, or is the legal system one big extortion racket designed to punish anyone that wants to stand up for themselves, their rights or their innocence?

Hint... the police are not that good... and thousands of innocent people are ground away by the system daily

But yeah, it's expensive, so it's more convenient for Americans to be tough on crime.

The fix here is likely political... body cams are a desperate attempt to make things a tiny bit better...

Could you elaborate on that? I have some thoughts but want to know if my thoughts are really valid. What type of court officer are you? Is it in the same jurisdiction? Things like that. I don't want to prejudice your responses.

(I should also mention that my thoughts aren't going to put any blame on you.)

Technically though, officer of the court is a pretty broad term that includes judges, magistrates, medical examiners and coroners, process servers, interpreters, and even bail bondsman. Anyone who plays a role in the functioning of the court and has duties to ensure justice is carried out. But really in practice you never hear anyone except lawyers refer to themselves as such.

It's usually a phrase we use to indicate that messing with us means messing with the judicial system, which tends to invite harsh punishment from judges, who are after all themselves attorneys.

You're a real life action hero for escaping a gun man in a moving vehicle!

Is it that this constitutes interrogation tactics? I know in other cases police have redacted tactics on the premise it would reduce their effectiveness.

Ideally the camera streams would be maintained by an independent, non-commercial body, with clear tenets, written with privacy in mind.

It was unbecoming of their professional standards (even off-duty) and he's representing the community. It even made the news (how I heard about it).

So remember, there are plenty of good cops and good forces out there. It's just the shit ones never get held accountable.

People who work in retail who grow to hate customers are not bad. Most probably want to yell at or strangle certain customers but they don't.

Giving people power without accountability is the problem.

Meanwhile, when I went to college ~100 miles away, man, the PD was horrific. They even lied on a police report I tried to file when I was robbed and said to my face (when I confronted them) "I'm not filing that report for you."

I ask because, honestly, I don't think I care what they police say when they first walk up as long as they solve the crime, catch the perpetrator.

The problem we have nowadays is that we get to see "how the (justice system) sausage is made" a lot more than we used to. And it's disturbing. But those guys out there with uniforms on are the ones trying to survive every day and bring criminals to justice. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback.

I don't know how to be an orthopedic surgeon. The closest thing I've had to medical training was a first aid and CPR class. What I do know is that if an orthopedic surgeon, upon first seeing an overweight patient complaining of hip pain says "lay off the cheeseburgers and your hip will be fine, you fat slob", that doctor is doing a bad job. Not only is it hostile and rude, it fails to attempt to adequately understand the situation before rushing to judgement.

I do know a little about how to be a police officer. I went to school for it, but decided that wasn't what I want to do with my life. Accusing a complainant of lying right off the bat without any investigation when the complaint is anything more believable than an alien abduction, then having the evidence of your rudeness deleted is not how to be a good cop. I don't think it really takes much training or experience to reach that conclusion.

Interesting, because most police officers don't need to go to school for it to get the job, right?

It's usually not a minimum requirement, but a degree, usually in criminal justice, can be a significant competitive advantage in applications.

You don't strictly need to go to school to be a professional programmer, either, but people still go to school for it.

If my arm was made out of a chair, I'd think I'd have difficulty throwing the ball to a wide receiver.

Yeah, no. It's not that dangerous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/28/chart...

As far as straight up getting murdered, it's in the top 2, but #1 taxi drivers are murdered at almost 3x the rate.

For policeman it's their job to go to dangerous places.

Yes, in this example, I would imagine non-government job injuries are probably under reported.

>No one has it in for ... taxi drivers

Apparently they do. They get murdered almost 3x as often per capita as police officers. Maybe it's their money they're after.

>For policeman it's their job to go to dangerous places.

The same can be said for taxi drivers, delivery drivers, postal service, electric linemen, crab fishermen, loggers, proctologists ...

It boils down to, I guess police is a dangerous profession, but certainly not in the extreme as shown by the existence of more dangerous professions. Also, being dangerous profession certainly doesn't excuse other types of workers to blatantly use deadly force because they are scared of their profession, and it shouldn't be an excuse for police to do the same. Yet, here we are, in a thread talking about police misconduct, and someone comes up with "but their jobs are dangerous," as if it should stand as an excuse for misconduct. It does not.

I hear this every time someone with a difficult job has it pointed out to them that they're doing it badly. They don't even pretend that somehow makes it acceptable to do the job badly; I honestly don't know what effect saying it is supposed to have.

We only end up discussing the tiny fraction of police cases where things go badly.

It's easy to be an armchair pilot, but usually crashes are caused by more complex issues.

If we were as diligent with our police forces as we are with commercial airlines we wouldn't have as many bad cops.

"Given the power and trust we place in police, I don't feel it's unreasonable to expect they treat people with respect and that they're punished pretty severely when they betray that trust."

The next morning I get a call from the detective in the county to the South confirming he obtained video from the gas station where this all originated (the defendant approaching me while I’m pumping gas).

Next I get a notification from Apple my iPad has been found, which I placed in lost/stolen mode. I call the detective who doesn’t answer his phone and then the police station in the county where I escaped and my iPad was located. Dispatch informed me they would not go to the address provided by Apple to look for the defendant, my car or iPad until I drove back up to that county and met with the police.

I drove back to the county and met with two police officers who drove to the address (only 1.5 miles from the police station) but they did not see my vehicle, and apparently there was no way they would get a warrant to search the domicile for my iPad and they wouldn’t bother knocking to see if the suspect was there.

Unconvinced I worked up the nerve to drive by the property myself...I’ll be damned if I didn’t see my car driving up and down the streets of this neighborhood. I did my best to tail the car until it parked 1 house away from the address provided by Apple, and watched as the defendant got out of my car walked into the the street as I drove past. Once again I called 911 and plead they come back out to the address while I waited a few blocks away.

Once I saw a police car enter the neighborhood I followed until we arrived at my car which had already been relocated about a block away from where I saw it park and I drove past the defendant. On scene an officer was questioning 2 individuals on the front porch of the house where my car was parked and the defendant was standing on the sidewalk about 5 feet from my car. I basically yelled officer that’s the man who kidnapped me with a gun and car jacked me. He was handcuffed and taken into custody.

Shortly after I was asked to appear at the police station where I ended up being questioned and accused of trying to buy “the hard stuff”...I had to ask, apparently that’s crack. And this was the same detective who already obtained video of the gas station corroborating my entire story, I explained I was an attorney that I had just run 18 miles on the morning I was kidnapped (showed my run keeper app and everything) and otherwise I wasn’t celebrating my 18 mile run with crack. Almost immediately I was told I can go, of course I asked if he would get a warrant to recover my iPad and more important look for the gun, and I was told “no, those kinds of resources don’t exist.”

The defendant was arrested on Sunday, charged with grand theft of an auto and bonded out on Monday. Not until the “State Attorney Hearing” a few weeks later where the State attoney confirmed she had 2 prior cases against this guy where with similar facts: he stole a car in the county to the South and the cars were recovered in the county to the North, did I finally feel vindicated. Then, 1 week later his bond was revoked and the real charges came including assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping with a fire arm.

As to it being easy to be a armchair quarterback, I wouldn’t know but I’ll take your word for it.

Edit: deleted link to the public record of the case

I dont know about "deserved" but if they can make it a drug case then they can keep the car, the ipad, and probably steal err "seize" more property from the victim under civil asset forfeiture

Further they can use that statistic to point to an increase in "drug activity" in the county opening up the dept for grants from the DEA and other federal programs under the failed War on Drugs

A simple car jacking they get no money for. Violent crime they get no money for

Drugs is where the money is

And I'm being serious. If it's that big of a problem for you, and you're getting robbed at gunpoint, GET THE CRAP OUT OF THERE.

Mine just sent a guy on ten day suspension WITHOUT PAY for getting mad at his kids football game and throwing a helmet. He was off-duty and still reflected poorly on the profession and his department so BAM, 10 days without pay.

It even made the news because so many people care about it.

Contrast that with whatever cesspool you're stuck living in, and once again, I suggest: You should probably move. Unless you're just exagerating and you're not actually in fear of injustice. But if your story is true, you should be.

Because if you think every police department is like that, then you're either listening to non-stop propaganda, or, surrounded by actual shit police departments.

And before you think I'm some automatic "cop defender", when I lived just 100 miles away for college, I was surrounded by shit cops, some of which who went to prison for being shit cops, and one even lied on a police report that I tried to file when I was robbed.