Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on their body cams

Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by bigbubba on Monday November 16, 2020 @04:57PM (#25117508)

Isn't that one of the roles the FBI has?

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by pydry on Monday November 16, 2020 @04:59PM (#25117527)

As far as i know it's more or less handled by police forces themselves with predictable results.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by bigbubba on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:04PM (#25117600)

It's my understanding that the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption, which I would think includes police departments that circle their wagons and protecting criminal cops. Probably they need to be doing a better job of it, but I believe they're meant to be (among other things) the organization you describe above.

I'm not really familiar with the details, but it's my understanding the Seattle PD are under some sort of probation system with the DOJ, which I'm guessing the FBI was involved with. So I think this sort of thing does happen, though I guess not enough.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by pdonis on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:09PM (#25117682)

> the FBI is meant to handle matters of state or local government corruption

They have a certain amount of ability to do that if the state or local government is violating Federal law. But they do not have general oversight or police powers, since the Federal government as a whole does not. Nor is it supposed to.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by bigbubba on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:23PM (#25117837)

Wouldn't local cops violating people's constitutional rights put them at odds with federal law?

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by pdonis on Monday November 16, 2020 @06:31PM (#25118459)

Yes, but that just means prosecuting individual cases. That is very different from trying to make systemic changes in the way local cops operate; those kinds of changes must be made by local governments, and are the kind of changes local citizens should be demanding, and should be voting local governments out of office for not making.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by tristor on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:40PM (#25118002)

Yes, and as a general rule when cases are brought they are under the auspices of a federal civil rights violation. These are very difficult cases to prosecute though, so I think the FBI overfocuses on lower hanging fruit unless there's a political motivation from the top to drive this.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by kbenson on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:06PM (#25117632)

I'm pretty sure trying to pass something like that would very quickly devolve into an argument about states rights. Probably rightly so, as even though oversight would be good, a Federal agency to do so might be problematic for many reasons.

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by ethbr0 on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:15PM (#25117748)

Pretty much every state has their own, state-level investigation bureau [0]. Automatically transferring footage to an internal affairs department there would distance it from the actual department, while preserving state control.

Aside from activating / deactivating the camera (with clear guidelines and penalties for doing / not doing so), and connecting it to a network at the end of a shift, it should be a black box. None of the IT functions should run out of the same police force.

Consequently, this also protects officers in the case of equipment failure: timestamp the activation / deactivation signals in a separate log file. If the footage isn't there, but they activated, then it's no longer their reputation on the line, because they had no involvement in the chain of custody.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_bureau_of_investigation

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Re:Lax oversight allows Chicago police to avoid turning on t... by kbenson on Monday November 16, 2020 @05:27PM (#25117881)

Yeah, a state department side-steps a lot of those problems (but also possibly lets states ignore it). A federal law requiring police interactions to be recorded and submitted to a state entity and requiring it be stored for a certain period would probably suffice. Then the FBI or whoever investigated an issue Federally (if it got to that) could subpoena it, since it's supposed to exist, and be handled by the state.

I agree it should be a black box. Rule #1 for accountability is that you don't rely on the entity that's being examined to give absolutely correct info. Whether that's debugging a process or reviewing an organization, outside instrumentation is essential.

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