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A comment on A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations. Parent comment

Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by avn2109 on Friday October 20, 2017 @02:09PM (#15517898)
It's blindingly obvious (to me) that the cops are just disabling the cameras before doing controversial things. I find it extremely surprising that nobody else seems to believe this theory.

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.

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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by darawk on Friday October 20, 2017 @04:16PM (#15518826)
It'd be trivial to find evidence of that in the data. They said that the number of use of force incidents was the same in the camera and non-camera groups. If the cops were disabling their cameras in anticipation of these events, these events would not show up in their camera recordings.
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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by donald123 on Friday October 20, 2017 @04:48PM (#15519017)
It's not trivial to find that in the data. The cops are not required to keep the camera on all the time, or at least there is no consequence not doing so. They got the number from "administrative data", basically just police reports and civilian complaints, etc. Nothing related to the camera data at all.
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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by 1024core on Friday October 20, 2017 @04:34PM (#15518937)
Or it could also mean that, camera or not, the cop could get away with anything as if the camera wasn't present.
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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by avn2109 on Friday October 20, 2017 @04:45PM (#15518998)
There are many other possible interpretations of the data, besides the one you provide above.

E.g. the cops can do lots of shady stuff that isn't a "use of force incident."

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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by darawk on Friday October 20, 2017 @05:17PM (#15519162)
Yes, but that'd show up in the data. If there were complaints against them, and those happened to coincide with the cameras being off, that's a very easy thing to detect in the data.
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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by mcguire on Friday October 20, 2017 @08:26PM (#15519983)
As far as I can tell, there is no analysis of the video data mentioned in this article. They're only comparing numbers of complaints with and without cameras.
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Re:A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations by CaptSpify on Friday October 20, 2017 @04:40PM (#15518972)
I personally know of two cops that blatantly admit that they do this as well. Now, I'm just a single-data point, but I wonder if there is any data as to how many times videos are "redacted" or "lost".
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