> Not exactly a fight, is it? We silenced the pounding dance music, but you get the idea.
Yes, I do. You intended to obscure relevant information to purposefully misconstrue or obfuscate the event.
The point of the cameras is that they are additive. That video, even without audio, as an addition to a statement that says something to the effect of "we danced with each other" would be viewed in an entirely different context. If it was in addition to one party stating "we never got close to each other" then it means something else.
In the end, it's additional information. If you have no information about the event whatsoever from the parties involved, just some footage without sound, then you have much larger problems.
One of the author's here — you're nailing the exact point that we were trying to emphasize. In real cases, we often have incomplete or obscuring documentation, and draw conclusions from that. The addition of another perspective can radically change our perception of an encounter. Granted, it's artificial to the point of absurdity in this case, but the point is made.
Glad you're exploring the issue, but... your scenarios are completely contrived. In the ACTUAL scenarios where there is video, we see dashcam video of officers shooting a suspect who is on the ground, and no threat, 9 additional times. We see officers shooting fleeing suspects in the back. We see officers taking 0.75 seconds to decide to murder a "suspect" who is holding a toy gun in a department store. Your story is talking about theoretical risks to interpreting video. In the actual facts, we have already seen that video can add a great deal of clarity to a situation, and often that clarity directly conflicts with sworn statements by the officers involved.
> Granted, it's artificial to the point of absurdity in this case, but the point is made.
That was what I was pointing out. Unfortunately it was before I had finished the article, otherwise my approach would have been different. Mea culpa.
> In real cases, we often have incomplete or obscuring documentation, and draw conclusions from that. The addition of another perspective can radically change our perception of an encounter.
And that's a really good point, and good on you for making it. The article got stronger as it went on, I juts thought it was pretty shaky in the beginning, because of that first video and how contrived it feels. Granted, I can see it may be problematic to show that situation well while including sound, but that it is possible for it to happen (large crowds, heavy traffic, malfunction, etc). I'm not sure if that calls for a different example, moving it from the first example to a later one, or both, but I think that would make for a stronger start.
As an aside, while it's a bit outside the scope of your article, I think it's very important that all the different perspectives (including participant accounts) be gathered before they've had a chance to see/hear/read others. That one participant describes the experience very differently than others is very important, and can convey a few different things. For example, beyond purposefully misconstruing events, it may just be that the state of mind (terror) of one of the participants kept them from acting rationally. That's information that may be lost if people are allowed to review other sources before giving a statement.
Reasonable person standard. A civilian does not typically get that close to a police. If I got that close to a traffic cop, I would probably be in jail.
Police are civilians. Some people see this as hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.
> If I got that close to a traffic cop, I would probably be in jail.
In the US, if you're jailed just for being in close proximity to a police officer, then you've been jailed illegally. (If, however, you refuse to give the guy some room when he asks for it, then you can be detained and (maybe) jailed.)
> Police are civilians ... it's a very important distinction.
The misuse of the word is a symptom of the real problem, it is deeply ingrained in police culture that they are fundamentally different. I think it was one of Dave Grossman's books, an author that enjoys a military and LEO following, that put forward the idea that they are sheepdogs - protecting the flock from the wolves. So that is a big problem, as the idea has gotten picked up in popular culture.
I don't really mind cops insisting that they aren't civilians, because I agree with them to a point - the root word doesn't seem to apply anymore. That is unlikely to change without a major overhaul in the standard escalation of force model, where the officer is taught to control a situation by being one level of force above everybody else - making them aggressors by default.
> The misuse of the word is a symptom of the real problem...
Agreed.
> I don't really mind cops insisting that they aren't civilians...
I do. ;) Because...
> [Police use as a] standard [situation control mechanism the] escalation of force model, where the officer is taught to control a situation by being one level of force above everybody else - making them aggressors by default.
Military police use de-escalation of force by default when interacting with non-combatants. It is drilled and drilled and drilled into their heads that the very fact that they are armed and/or armored automatically escalates the situation, so they MUSTcontinuously work to de-escalate the situation from the microsecond that they arrive on the scene.
Civilian police would be so much more competent and so much more reasonable if they had the same training that actual military personnel receive.
The only difference between what I said and what you said is that you've added that MP training emphasizes deescalation. Both MPs and civilian police observe the same force continuum, but it seems to me that MPs are simply more disciplined. I don't think it is realistic to try and bring regular cops up to that standard of discipline, it would be much easier to simply provide a less flexible justification for violence. Many years ago when I was in USMC security force I remember being trained on actions that nudge the escalation of force - which was likely the first time I heard the phrase "furtive movement". While I'd seen a fair amount force applied subsequent to that period of instruction, I never heard that justification used. It seems to be the go to justification outside of the military.
My point is that giving cops the latitude that the escalation of force provides is like giving the CEO's 15 year old nephew the commit bit and letting him write safety critical software in non-MISRA C.
Aside from your first sentence, and your (entirely reasonable!) opinions about the difficulty of providing proper training to civilian police, I agree almost entirely with your commentary. [0]
The core of my objection to police personnel calling non-police "civilians" is twofold:
* It lets police benefit from the competency halo projected by the military and their training when -in fact- most police get precious little training.
* It seeks to create a deep division between the police and the communities they serve. Police should be members of (and get to know) the communities that they police.
[0] It's important that cops be able to react with force to uncontrollable, imminently dangerous situations. However, I expect that those situations pretty much never actually happen. ;)
We generally are in agreement, just for different reasons. Whatever cache that halo might have bought them is long gone, thanks to the media's collective realization that stories of police misconduct are of public interest - with no ill effect on the popular opinion of the military (that I have noticed). I think civilian police are just trying to find a way of distinguishing themselves from those subject to their protection, which as you said, creates a deep division. I think they'd change their mind if the cost was trading their constitutional protections for the UCMJ... freedom has a flavor that those who have never been subject to an article 134 will never know :)
I don't think it is realistic to try and bring regular cops up to that standard of discipline
Why is that? I can understand if you think there's a practical problem with doing so (but would still lament that), but I think that ideally "regular cops" should absolutely be held up to that same standard. I mean, look... these people are literally given life-and-death responsibility over the general populace. They should be held to a ridiculously high standard.
It is a practical problem. The military has an extremely long institutional memory and has perfected the process of mental conditioning over hundreds of years, to the point where 18 year olds can be given the power to kill and dropped into situations with little to no supervision - and it generally doesn't result in an x-rated version of Lord of the Flies. The methods that the military uses to accomplish this would not work for police without a costly tear down and slow rebuild. The list of methods is far too long to list here, but they include a culture of self policing enabled by a meaningful shared experience (basic redefinition of family), and a mythology that requires a carefully managed narrative of history (Gen MacArthur's farewell address at West Point is full of examples).
Even if it wasn't life or death, they still determine the outcome of your physical well being, future and livelihood. Giving them access to lethal force with practical impunity is the icing on the why-give-them-so-much-power cake.
> Police are civilians. Some people see this as hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.
I've heard that before, but never seen any good support for it. I checked several dictionaries, and they say that police are not civilians. Here are the definitions of "civilian" they give.
New Oxford American Dictionary: "a person not in the armed services or the police force".
Merriam-Webster: "one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force".
Cambridge English Dictionary: "a person who is not a member of the police, the armed forces, or a fire department".
Dictionary.com (which uses Random House, I believe): "a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization"
Macmillan: "someone who does not belong to the military or the police".
There are some contexts in which "civilian" means anyone not in the military, but those are generally situations dealing with international laws of war or military law.
Dictionaries adapt to popular usage, so unless your argument is that popular usage is correct usage - dictionaries aren't good support either. Check the word origin, it originally distinguished those who are subject to civil law and those who aren't (US service members are subject to the Uniform code of military justice). Over the last couple hundred years it became less specific and was used to distinguish belligerents from the civil. More recently (as in I don't remember it being used this way 20 years ago) it has been used to distinguish those with authority from the lesser-thans.
I prefer the old definition, because now - due to the corruption of the word, we have no unambiguous word to describe the original concept. We already have plenty of words to describe those without authority.
I'd say police aren't civilians because they're not acting in their own right; they're a specific designated extension of the state.
It probably depends on your state and your police force though. Gendarmes are military trained IIRC, also in Italy there are something like 7 different types of police.
It can also help corroborate times, distances, and other hard facts that tend to be exaggerated or distorted by the mind when remembering stressful situations.
They don't mention what I think is the biggest benefit of body cameras - deterring bad behavior (by police and civilians).
When the Orlando, FL police department did a 12-month trial with body cameras:
In the 12 months from March 2014 through February 2015, use-of-force incidents — also known as “response to resistance” incidents — dropped 53 percent among officers with the cameras. Civilian complaints against those officers also saw a 65 percent decline. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-body-camera-study...)
Exactly. What is the point of NYTimes running this kind of piece, except to court favor with police unions.
It only serves to cloud the issue, by encouraging people to forget that bodycam video and dashcam video are strictly additive evidence.
A preponderance of the evidence shows that police will do anything they can to suppress information that makes them accountable. Hence dashcam audio that gets disabled, nearby security camera footage that gets deleted, and so on.
Maybe NYTimes is just afraid that they will alienate the police unions if they state the truth: that all law enforcement and the general public alike are protected and constrained by low-cost video recording.
"Chicago Police Department officers stashed microphones in their squad car glove boxes. They pulled out batteries. Microphone antennas got busted or went missing. And sometimes, dashcam systems didn’t have any microphones at all" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160127/archer-heights/what...
And to pile on the point made by the link that jobu posted, Rialto, CA had similarly stunning results in their study: http://www.ci.calistoga.ca.us/home/showdocument?id=18839 - Big drops in both complaints and use of force. London Metro PD too.
Disclaimer/Pitch: I'm a software engineer at Axon, who produces body worn cameras and digital evidence management software. They facilitated all of these studies, since we can't wait around for other people to do it. We're hiring, if you want to work on a product that does some genuine social good. There's some pretty cool problems to work on with the volume of video data we've got, as well as a whole host of other interesting opportunities. You can email me at brandon@evidence.com if you're interested.
While cameras will never be the whole story, it does not hurt to have an additional piece of evidence. Something I noticed while watching the videos was that the wearer of the camera did not even have it properly strapped down, so it was flapping all over the place attached to a t-shirt making the video even worse (which is what the makers of these videos wanted). I think if the camera was properly secured to a normal police uniform or vest it would be much clearer what is going on.
I appreciate your comment, but couldn't it also be the intent of the police officers wearing the camera not to secure it, because shitty footage is sort of more the desired effect than an unintended consequence?
I took this video as being an investigation of that very possibility.
Possible, but the intent of the article seems to be to cast doubt on the value of body cam footage as a matter of its inherent limitations. Police intentionally not securing the camera to their body properly wouldn't be in service of that.
To me, this article proved that body-camera evidence is extremely valuable, you just have to be methodical when interpreting it. I watched the videos carefully, frame-by-frame, and only made one error (I didn't identify the taser in one of the videos). Re-watching that video while knowing what I was looking for (as I would if comparing testimonies), it was easy to see that was what had happened. I see how someone who wasn't really thinking about it would be fooled, but if you think about what the videos show, they're excellent data.
In the first one - the camera was bouncing around a lot, and the main question was whether the guy was punching the guy wearing the camera. I looked at the angle his arms were at in still frames, and concluded that they couldn't be punches. The same works for both angles of the traffic stop video: you have to pause and think through some geometry, but you can figure out that the officer and suspect don't touch with reasonably high confidence.
I'm not sure what the stats are supposed to show, but I suspect they live updated stats don't quite prove the bias the author was intending to show.
At the time I'm writing this, both the majority of those who trust and those who distrust the police saw the situations as non-threatening. The difference between the groups is about 9% points, but that is hardly the kind of difference you'd expect from how it is phrased.
That said, the point of body cameras is to help prove or disprove claims by those involved in an incident about what happened. The use of the tazer is not directly visible but even in the shaky body cam you can see the officer grabbing the tazer and hear a distinctive clicking noise as the suspect falls to the ground. It doesn't fully refute the claim that the suspect is reaching for the gun, but as far as the hands are visible, it certainly doesn't support the claim either (and the cop's aggressive behaviour while the suspect is standing still certainly makes the claim more dubious).
It's also important to realize that when these are treated as evidence they won't just be shown once. They will be scrutinized frame by frame, repeatedly, down to the individual pixels if necessary.
There is no perfect evidence. Even crystal-clear, unobscured video footage of a crime doesn't tell the whole story. But court cases are not about proving what happened -- they're about merely eliminating all reasonable doubt about whether a suspect did commit the punishable crime they are charged with.
As with all "facts" in life, court cases only deal with degrees of probability. You don't have to know because you can't actually know.
Yeah, have to admit — we really had no idea what the spread would be. In some ways, it's surprising that there's much of a difference at all—or perhaps gratifying.
A point of clarification for the curious—the majority of both groups actually found the situations threatening. The 'serious' threat percentages in the larger numbers, is confined only to the those who chose 'Very threatening' in the questions.
From what you've observed, it sounds like we should revisit that choice (earlier drafts displayed 'Somewhat threatening' and 'Very threatening' choices grouped together, in which case a strong majority of both people who trusted and distrusted the police, found the situations threatening.)
Yeah that's exactly what I thought. The guys dancing at the top of the article was a 3 second clip. You don't see the lead up or hear the sound, how are you meant to judge from that
The defendant's lawyer would say "this is footage of the officer dancing with my client" and context magically appears in the courtroom. But now we have to wonder why anybody is in a courtroom with a jury at all, if that's what the footage actually shows.
Imagine a Fox news story about an officer shooting someone, with only a few seconds of a video clip released by the police (the rest of the clip is not privy to the public yet). They could replay the same 3-4 seconds over and over and build speculation.
That's not exactly a far-fetched idea, you can probably come up with plenty more. The authors are clearly trying to emphasize that a few seconds of footage is not enough to make a decision - so you agree with them.
I care less about what fox news shows people vs what the jury gets to see in the courtroom. So the article has nothing to do with the legal side of things? Skewing police body camera footage for entertainment is definitely going to happen and that doesnt really bug me, but what does bug me is that somehow people think a jury would only see a 3 second clip without sound or any context in a court room.
Been on a jury with video evidence. You watch the entire video, even if nothing is happening, if one of the lawyers requests it. Selective clips are frowned upon, at least in my experience.
It showed that the suspect fell because the officer shot him with a taser.
These details were not captured by the police body camera, though, revealing another important point: Body cameras prioritize the officer’s point of view.
The tazer, including the officer aiming, was clearly visible and it causing the fall was very obvious from the body camera.
Same with the other videos. You don't even need software to analyze frame by frame, the web player is enough to see what is going on.
Cameras protect the innocent because they do not lie.
Anybody else watched the video and thought they were dancing? It occurred to me but then I dismissed it because it seemed so disingenuous to use that as an example of the footage being unclear.
Yes. But I didn't see it as disingenuous, I simply saw it as a test of determining the action that was occurring.
The point of the article seemed to me to be about whether you can reconstruct the true narrative of a situation from fragmented and incomplete data. So It seemed valid to me to use any scenario to test that ability, dancing included.
This article misses the point. The benefit of body cameras isn't for the gray areas, the benefit is to remove the egregious (on both sides) edge cases.
The point of the body cam isn't to provide an all seeing narrative it's to increase the chance that if any party does anything flagrantly unreasonable it'll likely get caught on camera.
1. Police purposely buy and insist on camera models that have very limited vision, range and abilities because they want it to be as bad or worse than a cop's limited observation ability
2. Police have learned a new trick - they do not legally have to release the camera footage at all - it is essentially for their own purposes only - so if it helps them, they release it - if it works against them, they don't release it and nothing you can do about it
If we want to change this, the same lawmakers that give police millions of tax dollars for cameras needs to set higher standards, better cameras and full release of videos to all involved parties in a very timely manner or face criminal penalties of their own.
i had a reasonable interpretation of the videos, not 100% i missed the taz, thought he just stumbled, but other than that i thought it was relatively useful to see those body camera shots.
I had to watch each video twice before answering. And if I hadn't been given the possibilities in a multiple choice format, I may have gotten something wrong.
I found the car stop the most threatening for the officer. Seriously, if you're stopped by the cops, hands on top of the steering wheel... reaching for insurance papers looks hella scary.
Well, you can clearly see a lot of commotion happening inside the car. It's clearly not a good idea to just walk next to the driver's side if you already see flailing arms and get no reaction from announcing your presence.
I would have expected the officer to pause for longer before approaching the door and to be a lot more vocal about what he is doing -- precisely because he can't tell what is going on from a quick glance. You don't want to get stabbed but you also don't want to taze or shoot an innocent person to death.
Even if the camera was on the officer’s glasses or hat, the up-close footage would be confusing.
The original footage was not confusing, in my opinion. It was fabricated to look like a violent interaction faced by an officer, and that is the most likely situation. The audio off is necessary for the fabrication.
A camera mounted on the officer's glasses/hat would only make it even clearer as there'd be less jerk. Perhaps a larger viewing angle would be useful too.
I worked here in the UK with body worn video. Cameras attached to heads are really awful, while they're normally pointing in the right direction as officers move around the video is virtually unwatchable as the view slews around.
Most of the videos linked to are a bit artificial, in my experience video taken while an officer runs isn't normally all that interesting.
The biggest bonuses we found were:
Just telling someone it was being recorded often made things less aggressive.
Drunks & disorderly offenders would plead guilty once they'd been shown the video from the previous night which means an officer doesn't have to go to court.
Less complaints and often there is a way to sort out the truth.
Domestic violence was a lot easier to prosecute, my favourite tale was a drug den with a small child where within 24 hours the parents had somehow managed to repaint / get fresh furniture when the social workers went back the following day.
Most of the UK officers I've met have been good folks trying to do a difficult job, although the US officers I spoke to do did seem to be a bit more military in their attitude.
In an investigation, I wager these videos would be analyzed frame by frame, seeing them like this makes it far more difficult to figure out what happened. Just looping them several times it becomes much clearer.
No, some people just aren't living in urban places. Police in the suburbs are chill because they don't have to fear for their lives and don't usually deal with delinquent giving them attitude. People treat police well. Police treat people well. The gift keeps on giving and everyone is happy.
I live in the UK where we have a completely different approach to policing.
I trust the police. They work hard in our communities to gain that trust. They don't always get it right and they have their issues (some very big) but on balance they are a trusted part of (most of) our communities here.
I really don't want to get into a flame war or anything, it's just that lots of different place in the world have very different police forces.
Most people are mostly good.. that is an absolute truth, and unless police aren't people, then most police are also mostly good. That's not to say I don't despise some of the actions, the blue vs. everyone else tactics and stances that have been taken in some incidents... or those organizationally corrupt.
That said, most people (and police) are mostly good.
Most people can't fuck you up as much as a bad encounter with a cop, so it doesn't really matter if "most" cops are good; what matters is that you never have a bad encounter with a cop.
Some people, and some classes of people[1] are almost guaranteed to have bad encounters with cops.
A good goal would be to reduce the number and severity of bad encounters.
1. Ethnic Minorities, Persons with mental health issues, etc.
I wonder what it would look like if the videos were stabilized. It could dramatically decrease how wild they seem and make it easier to understand what's going on.
That sounds very helpful and frightening at the same time.
In the future where everything is recorded the records should be sealed unless a warrant for those recordings is presented. The warrants should be made public.
Recording everything is alredy happening in some cities, like London, but the control is on the side of law enforcement.
Yes, I do. You intended to obscure relevant information to purposefully misconstrue or obfuscate the event.
The point of the cameras is that they are additive. That video, even without audio, as an addition to a statement that says something to the effect of "we danced with each other" would be viewed in an entirely different context. If it was in addition to one party stating "we never got close to each other" then it means something else.
In the end, it's additional information. If you have no information about the event whatsoever from the parties involved, just some footage without sound, then you have much larger problems.