Speaking as a staunch privacy advocate, this is a very positive article. Police should indeed wear these cameras, and any interaction that occurs off camera should be viewed by courts with suspicion. No longer will 'confessions' rely on the memory of the officer; no longer will complaints become a "criminal's word against the officer". This is a very very good thing.
Note that it is not a violation of anyone's privacy. Police interactions with the public cannot be private, with the only exception being undercover police work or other times when the identity of the other person must be protected as in the case of a minor. These cameras can and will prevent petty (and egregious) abuses of power that American police have grown used to getting away with. Right now there are insufficient safeguards against police misconduct, and ubiquitious cameras would be a good step toward making those safeguards sufficient.
There are a few other situations in which the privacy of citizens is at risk with this tech. As the article notes:
Privacy advocates worry that video of police officers searching a suspect’s home could end up on the evening news.
But I agree with the ACLU, as quoted later in the article, that:
“[The cameras] do raise privacy concerns, but ones that can be addressed by strong privacy policies.”
I nevertheless agree that on-duty police officers should have no expectation of privacy except in cases of undercover work. And frankly, with the multitude of undercover operations that border on entrapment, maybe those operations need to be documented better as well.
The solution there is to take all the DRM technology that has been used to block fair use, and repurpose it to enforce citizen privacy: Block the ability of ordinary officers to pull video data off the cameras. They can only transfer it to the police video-backup server, which will only allow it to be watched on special viewing stations. Give the police chief a key that lets the video out, when necessary.
The Crest advocate, Selena Parmenter, is in her early thirties if appearances can be trusted, and she acts bored. She has said little to Mary as they wait for the deputy district director of Seattle Oversight, the honorable Clarens Lodge, to take his seat and listen to their appeals.
Oversight was created in the teens. The first states to use the procedure were California and Washington. With so much information on citizens recorded daily by vid, home monitors, fibe and satlink uploads, and neighborhood
surveillance systems, a separate branch of the judiciary was established to hear appeals from those seeking to use that information for legal purposes.
Early abuses--and the far worse systematic abuse under the Raphkind presidency--has made the system painfully complex for all concerned. Each avenue of information has been wrapped in labyrinthine rules of legal engagement; and an appeal for release of data can be made only once a year for any given case.
I agree, but I don't think this obviates the need for regular citizens' videotaping the police. If surveillance is going to be omnipresent, I think it's crucial that regular people are able to present their viewpoints as well.
If we rely solely on the recordings that are produced by the powerful, it seems all too likely that things will be presented out of context, recordings will be 'lost', etc
I would assume (read: hope) that both defense and prosecution would have access to the entire taped incident. And if the taping were lost that the benefit of doubt would go to the civilian, not the officer.
The difference is that if there was supposed to be a video, and the video went missing while in the sole custody of the police, it is a reasonable inference that the video went missing because it supports the defendant's version of events rather than the police version.
Indeed--this is a standard evidentiary rule (and jury instruction) in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. In a criminal case, it would be enough to throw out the case, with prejudice. In a civil case, the judge would even be within his authority to issue a finding of fact against the party that "lost" the video.
I was in traffic court last week and a guy was there fighting a ticket he got for impeding traffic. According to the cop, the guy was stopped in the middle of the road and did not pull off the road when asked.
According to the guy, he was stopped because there was traffic in front of him, and pulled over after the light turned green and the cars blocking him in cleared out.
The guy (a casually dressed minority with tattoos all over his arms and neck) seemed frustrated as hell when all the cop did was was to simply tell the judge "I didn't see anyone in front of him" over and over as the guy tried to explain his side of the story. The ruling: guilty as charged.
I don't know what the truth was, but it sure would have been nice if there was videotape to see who was lying. As it was, it was the cop's word against the word of a guy who looked like it would be all to easy to declare him guilty.
I think the initial sense of disapproval comes from the connotation we usually associate with cameras: things that watch us in order to regulate our behavior.
But in this case, it is the cops who are being watched. As you note, "any interaction that occurs off camera" will be suspicious...aficionados of irony can recognize how this turns the cop-favorite-notion of "if you're doing nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?"
And the digital/systematic nature of the cameras' operation makes it even more pervasive to the officer. It's not just what you saw, but...why were you looking there, of all places? Why is your camera off during a time that you're supposed to have it on?
One thing I would've liked to see in the OP is to know the change in absolute number of officer initiated stops. If you know you have this extra layer of scrutiny to deal with, you may decide to not harass someone who is just barely breaking the law.
I'm wondering out loud, what would the repercussions, from a behavioral standpoint be, if everyone wore something like google glass. Would almost everyone turn into "law"-abiding persons? Would that even be desirable? I'm sure drunk, or otherwise in an altered state of mind, people would still act quite unruly. But what would the effect be on regular people? Would it be mostly chilling, or a kind of werdly pleasant place where people act nice because getting away with "unlawful behavior" would be much more difficult? Gone would be some adolescent rites of passage...
It could become the ultimate case of people policing each other (in the sinister neighborhood watch committees sense --ala Cuba, Vietnam, etc.)
In modern America we have this outlandish idea that it is a fine thing to "be ourselves" to the limits of the law out in public.
More traditional etiquettes include the concept of what happens in public following different rules from what happens in private. "I do not care as long as he does not scare the horses in the street" is the old saying. Just do not cause other people hassles, please. (This has a dark aspect, too, overlooking domestic violence hidden behind closed doors, but that is not important to the question on hand.)
If we move to a world where your public behavior might be displayed to your family and co-workers, I think that will be a good thing overall. If you want to misbehave, please keep it in private locales.
I like Heinlein's use of this in "For Us, The Living", he breaks out the Public and Private spheres and addresses how anything done in the private sphere is effectively heavily tabooed to inquire about, and could even become a criminal penalty.
Politicians having a much smaller private sphere of course.
I anticipate allowing undercover cops to go unrecorded will prompt police departments to make all cops undercover. To better serve the public of course.
I think any authority that accepts money from the public should be obligated to surveil themselves. Not just cops, but federal, state, and local regulators as well. What you do on the public's dime should be publicly available, with an API to your speech and location.
In Texas, at least, police can't pull you over in a car that doesn't say "Police". I suppose they could have plainclothes officers drive the "stealth" cars with their decals in reflective light gray, so long as they still would be "undercover" under the wording of the policy/laws.
Houston is way ahead of you. I don't live there anymore, but circa 06-08 they introduced dodge charger cop cars with 'ghost' paint, which is basically only visible if you're parallel with the car. they're primarily used for traffic enforcement, always assumed that it was just to increase revenue at the cost of reducing speeding deterrence, but from your comment it looks like they're threading that loophole nicely.
Maybe some very corrupt departments would try to pull this, but it sounds like the cameras are a boon for cops too. Fewer complaints, fewer lawsuits, more cooperative suspects, and less time in court. What's not to like?
Honestly, if I'm walking down the street and I see a cop, I tend to ... behave ... better. (Not that I go around looking for trouble or anything.) If there's a cop watching, it doesn't really matter to me whether or not he's got a camera on his glasses; either way, I'm being watched.
If this cuts down on police abuse (and other wasteful crap), then I'd say the pluses outweigh the minuses.
It's not pervasive if each cop has a camera recording - the cameras are in the same places as cops. Plus if they record only in the case of interactions with members of the public then it's even less "pervasive".
Yes, actually. I know my opinion is unpopular in communities such as HN, but I am actually in favor of mass surveillance. Though I find the lack of oversight at the NSA completely unacceptable.
When I was doing a politics startup and people asked me if we'd make a mobile app, my standard response was that the only mobile app I wanted was something that would continuously track and report politicians' coordinates.
I'm most interested in the application to SWAT teams and how that will or won't impact their increasing militarization and general overuse of force. It'll be interesting to see how much resistance there is (I'd expect a lot) to making SWAT teams wear them.
As long as those video feeds get stored by someone else than the police, or at least that police department, otherwise certain video feeds could easily be "misplaced" or "corrupted".
Still though this is not a checks and balances approach. It's a covering you butt approach. True reform would include third party oversight, not just internal investigations.
I think the "corrected" title works fine, actually. The point of the article is not just that complaints declined (though that may be the point you care about the most)...the point is that even though cameras are credited for this improvement, larger (more politically known) police departments are opposing it, for various reasons.
I was really surprised to see that Bloomberg opposed it. Yes, the startup cost is high, but it seems like it'd be offset by the decline in fighting lawsuits.
> But when Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled on Monday that the city’s stop-and-frisk program was unconstitutional and ordered that police officers in certain precincts strap tiny cameras to their uniforms to record their dealings with the public, Mr. Bloomberg’s response was immediate and emphatic.
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> “It would be a nightmare,” he said. “We can’t have your cameraman follow you around and film things without people questioning whether they deliberately chose an angle, whether they got the whole picture in.”
Um, just like you can't have cops carry guns because you'll have people questioning whether they were right to shoot and kill someone? Strange reasoning from the mayor.
Police handguns are cheap, and the cost argument is not only not viable, it is probably only being used because it sounds better than the alternative of 'we don't want the NYPD subject to such transparency and scrutiny from the public'.
Police handguns aren't very expensive. The Glock 17, a very popular model, is about $600 and I wouldn't be surprised if police departments get discounts.
So the cameras, apparently at $900/officer, are hardly an obscene expense. That is what, a week's worth of pay? I should hope NYC could scrap together that sort of cash.
I assumed it was about CCTV cameras based on the corrected title. Wearable cameras is a much more interesting story - glad I hit the comments to figure that out.
Recording the police has got be a good thing almost all the time. Unless they can "accidentally" not record an encounter or "accidentally" delete one, it will most certainly place moral pressure on the officers.
We all know they have never had legal a duty to protect any civilian, but whenever it was that police subtly turned from a "protect and serve" ideology into "law enforcement" was a dark transition for America.
This reminds me of the controversy that happened when the CIA videotaped "enhanced interrogation techniques" and 90 of the videos got mysteriously destroyed. Noone was ever held criminally responsible for that [1].
There's a definite need that the video should be streamed as backup to a department (or more neutral 3rd party) database or made incapable of being deleted.
If officer recording becomes the norm though, an "accidentally" deleted recording is going to be viewed with a lot of suspicion by the courts and is going to put a lot more weight onto any testimony against you.
And a correlation between citizen complaints and a particular officer having mysteriously incomplete records is going to look bad in front of a jury.
What will happen is that police chiefs will simply tell problem officers that if they are going to "forget" to turn on cameras when interacting with citizens, they best "forget" to show up to work that day.
It also ha the benefit of making citizens act better as well. The article said it's basically a win, win situation. The only people that would be against this are corrupt cops and their overlords (i.e. Bloomberg).
From a UI/UX standpoint, it might let the officers feel more in control, but manual activation makes the system much more prone to error. I think it would be best to have constant activation.
I don't think there should be constant activation. Only during confrontation. It'd take the fun out of the job. I wouldn't want all the stupid shit and banter I say between my friends and I on a daily basis to be recorded. When on breaks, just chilling in the car.
I know this is a silly concern, but I'm a sworn protector of the chill.
This can be handled through key management. Give officers an option to switch on a privacy mode through a "key fob" which basically just manages encryption keys. "Privacy mode" time spans are just encrypted with an additional key. If a court proceeding wants something from a "privacy mode" time, they can still request it.
This would prevent officers using this feature to hide improper procedure while also preventing other officers from using the device to eavesdrop.
I doubt there's any chance of that, I outlined the reasons here, in response to someone who noted they budget 150 rounds per year for practice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6187591
Kind of interesting (if not surprising) that the "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" line peddled by the NSA's ilk actually seems to work really well when applied to those with authority.
The police are the executors of the state's monopoly on the use of force, and where a state exists by the consent of the governed, it is uniquely important that the police are, without exception, held responsible to the people.
Any philosophy allowing unlimited or arbitrary state power over individuals turns the state, is one where the state, rather than the people, has full liberty, and is the master. That's the historical status quo (sans Greece, Rome) prior to liberalism, Locke.
I think the key is that filming on the job is different from accessing all non-professional information. I fully expect police departments to monitor officer emails if there is suspected mis-use. I don't see how these cameras are different.
The only problem I can see is that like-it-or-not, some of cop's behavior involves not enforcing bad laws. Cameras might take away ability to let things slide. Maybe that results in the long overdue reform of our laws. Maybe it just means nobody gets off the hook for anything anymore.
Isn't that the issue with automatic red-light cameras, and automated radar cameras?
That is, we (as a society) have set penalties for infractions that are really high based on the danger of those infractions. We didn't have enough patrol cars or cops to enforce every stop light or speed limit, so we made the penalties quite high because of the low probability of getting caught.
We must revisit all penalties if universal enforcement gets into place.
I assume that the video is only really reviewed in the event of complaint or when needed for evidence. Unless the goal starts to be to catch everyone all the time for everything.
From the article: "...half of the city’s patrol officers were randomly assigned to wear body cameras each week, and instructed to turn them on whenever they made contact with a civilian."
This means that before Rodney King 2.0, the police involved need only "forget" to turn on their cameras. The only way body cameras bring an accountability benefit is if boots-on-the-ground officers lack the ability to disable them. Failing that, we've merely diminished civilian privacy.
I think "Rodney King 2.0" angle is being terribly unfair to the police, even though I so happen to find the police actions there deplorable.
Those police officers were making a proper stop of a fleeing suspect. But they lost control of the situation, both the suspect and their own emotions, and could not think of anything better than to keep increasing the level of force applied when their previous application of force failed.
IMO, their failure is we expect police officers to behave more like human beings and less like automatons. But they did not intend to put anyone in the hospital/morgue when they stepped out of their squad cars.
Cameras might have saved Rodney King such a severe beating precisely because those officers would have turned on their cameras, since their initial intentions were proper. What the cameras would have done is put every officer on notice that their actions would be closely scrutinized, after the fact. They probably would have behaved better, if that were the case.
There is a subtlety here that helps defendants with competent lawyers. The police and prosecutors will be more than happy to show video evidence in court when it justifies police actions -- it is pretty hard to raise doubts about the claim that a suspect charged at the police with a knife when the police have a video of it happening. When the police show up in court and claim to have forgotten to turn their cameras on, the defense gets a big boost -- "Convenient that you forgot to turn the camera on just before beating my client into a coma, yet you did not fail to turn it on in your previous 30 arrests."
This is over-idealistic. Most cases never go to trial, especially when faced with "perp's word against cop". GP post is correct - the absence of video is not sufficient alone. The cops will just turn the cameras off when breaking the law.
I would hypothesize that it is a very rare police officer who walks around intending to break the law before they know the facts. They break the law because it turns out to be very convenient given how the situation unfolds (e.g. add a few extra baloney charges because the suspect pissed the officer off during minor misbehavior).
The cameras are very convenient, too. It makes defendants cave when they see what the jury will see.
If the convenience of the cameras is sufficient great (I bet honest officers will love it), the habit will be to always turn them on. Thus even the slightly wobbly officers will behave better, simply because it usually makes their job easier.
What do you think will happen to police officers who both have an unusual number of gaps in their electronic record, and a lot of citizen complaints? Police chiefs want fewer headaches...
There may be some psychology at play here. By giving the police the cameras and having it focused at the people they interact with, it keeps them feeling like they are the ones in power (e.g. pointing the camera at people the same way you would point a gun).
I suspect that they would be (and demonstrably are) much less amenable if they knew citizens were wearing cameras pointed at them to record all interactions.
Interesting. I wonder how much of it comes from officers being more self-conscious and from people being less likely to file a claim they know would be easily disproved.
I imagine most of the behavior changes are from that, if you know you're being recorded then you're going to act better overall because it's going to be hard to lie later when the film disproves you.
I am sure that is true, even if it is just their voice on the tape, with the camera pointed forward.
Any potential prosecution will involve someone from the DA's office reviewing all evidence. How many officers want to be seen as an overt bully by even a (probably) friendly suit in the DA's office?
Who wants the first thing the jury notices about the tape is how very rude the officer is?
A long time ago, police whined and whined and whined about how the Miranda Rule got in the way of getting convictions. The real result is that police forces are more professional now, and it raises credibility in the eyes of juries. Yes, police officers have crafty workarounds to trick people in confessions while they are "not quite yet" suspects. But that is a big step forward. Officers are working from a standard set of procedures that have been reviewed by attorneys and the court system.
Police raised their game.
The same will happen here. Citizens will be more compliant. Officers will be more polite and more professional. Police will raise their game.
> William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, believes the cameras may offer more benefits than merely reduced complaints against his force: the department is now trying to determine whether having video evidence in court has also led to more convictions.
I dislike that this is a measure of "success". More or fewer convictions is not necessarily a good thing, because the existence of the camera does not magically make any particular criminal more or less guilty. What they should be measuring is the increased degree of certainty of the result of any trial, whether the accused is found guilty or not guilty.
That's borderline impossible to measure. If there was a better way than courts to determine guilt or innocence (so that the result of the trial could be compared to the truth), it would be atrocious not to use that way instead of the courts.
I think xsace's point was that letting callers know they may be recorded makes them less likely to be abusive towards the call center worker and/or less likely to make false representations of what was said to them.
Of course, state (and federal?) laws make the disclosure mandatory, so it's hard to know if there's any motivation beyond that.
In many states it is illegal to record a conversation unless all parties of the conversation have knowledge of the recording (and thus give implied consent).
There is a cool TV show on Scyfy right now called Continuum that has "future" technology that records everything a police office sees and regularly backs it up to a remote storage for evidence. In addition, it provides a host of situational awareness aids.
From an enforcement and tactical perspective, such technology is invaluable and will undoubtedly save lives.
It also alleviates the he said/she said issues and makes improper behavior by officers plain as day in court.
As long as it doesn't have sensors that can "see through walls", this tech isn't particularly invasive. If it can breach the boundary of your private home, that's another issue all together.
This seems like a pretty logical step. I'm sure we've all seen cases where dash cameras on police cars help clear up ambiguity regard what really happened during a police stop. The same for normal officers could help solve a lot of problems, though obviously it would be inappropriate for undercover operations, some detective work, etc.
That said, one potential issue with this system is that it might lead to people being less willing to talk to the police. The "stop snitching" culture is already a major problem in many cities and if this measure reinforces it, it could end up being detrimental to the public good.
I agree. Plato said, "To be just is to do no harm." I would argue up until now, we had best effort at full information at a transaction level between the police/the incident/the public. The flaw was the only accredable information was asymmetric from the point of view of the police officer. Some times this situation led to fibbing to close a case or cover up a mistake.
Now there can be the solution to have symmetric, or full, information for the same situation. The only 'harm' now would be to those who forget the truth, embellish it, or are just bad at their job and lie.
I just find it interesting that Police departments are now looking to record every interaction on video when in the past these exact Police departments (Oakland, LA + Rialto) have been very hostile to any citizen using a recording device.
Idea for a device for Bad Cops who don't like people recording them:
A harness with speakers for an iPad to be worn on the chest. It plays Disney movies at high volume.
Whenever you want someone to stop filming you, simply flip the switch and let it blast. If they don't immediately stop filming, book em for unlawfully recording a motion picture.
Police and individuals should be able to use these, I hope it isn't a one way street, citizens should also be able to record the other side. I'd assume if both people have a Google glass like always on cam people will be much nicer on both sides.
Well this is a situation where I don't mind not having privacy.
However is there a way to ensure the video hasn't been altered? Images are worth a thousand words but when the images are lying you as the accused are screwed.
Great pilot program, now we can step it up a notch. Put cameras on all state level politicians and judges=) When the corruption numbers start to fall, then move up to the federal level=)
The cost issue is way overblown. $900 per officer is too much for the big cities - each officer in those big cities is paid at least $5000, and with pensions, vehicles, facilities costs, tco must be at least 20k. There's politics in those departments that's preventing camera introduction. A lot those cops in the big cities are the worst offenders in police brutality.
There's a lot of opportunity for startups to get into this game. Smartphones and tablets could be outfitted as cheap cams for the public to videotape their own encounters, fitted in cars, houses, and the side of buildings. Real time transmittal of video to cloud services so corrupt cops can't confiscate the footage.
There's also the huge opportunity in drone surveillance, sold to private individuals, police departments, and local neighborhood watchs.
If by privacy concerns, you mean "We don't want our mistakes made public". In this case, the running over of a crash victim from Asiana flight 214 that crashed at SFO recently.
Use of force is a hot button issue, but both police and fire personnel have a lot of critical situations where not adhering to safety procedures can get someone hurt or killed. Once you get past use of force, there are more similarities than differences.
The police should be spending their time in public places, and their actions should be open to scrutiny by the public. If the police enter a private home with a warrant, privacy concerns have already been addressed by the warrant. As long as the system for cataloging and accessing the videos is open source and available for the public to scrutinize (and to check for ways it might be used beyond auditing the police themselves), where do you see a privacy problem?
Actually, rather than a violation of privacy, this may be a great victory for accountability. I say this because I do not believe that anyone expects privacy for an action that they perform within the sight of a cop: if a cop is there, you can assume he will see you, it's kind of silly to think otherwise.
However, what it does do is provide accountability. It is no longer a matter of "the cop vs the criminal", now, in court, there will be video evidence for what actually happened. For law abiding citizens, there will be no difference, for the cops, it will mean that they will be forced to provide reasons for and accurate accounts of all their actions. This does not violate privacy, it protects the innocent from the wrong doings of thugs in cop uniforms. (not saying all cops are like this, most aren't, but there's always a few bad apples)
"...I do not believe that anyone expects privacy for an action that they perform within the sight of a cop"
Perhaps my age is showing here, but I remember when the first rule of the internet is that there are no secrets on the internet. The assumption was that, if you didn't want it broadcast on the nightly news, you didn't say it on the internet. It didn't have anything to do with the NSA. The assumption was just that the sysadmin would read your e-mails and monitor your chats if she was bored. It came down to the whole "my hard drive is my property and I have the right to read any e-mails stored on my property". However, it's clear that societal mores have changed, so I'm not sure that it's any more unreasonable to expect privacy in front of a cop.
For instance, maybe I don't want the government to have video of me at a urinal. Of course, cops are human, so they're going to have to use the bathroom. When the cop enters the bathroom and stands waits in line for a toilet, did the government get a right to record my urination? Heck, can I record other people at the urinal, or are those surveillance rights reserved for just the government? Can stores setup bathroom cameras? Okay, I'm getting unreasonably sarcastic here, but I had thought the obvious solution would be to have the cops turn off their camera when they go to the bathroom. However, the public opinion seems clear that we don't want the cops to have an off switch, so I'm a little confused no about who gets to record me in the bathroom.
Anything the camera can record is something the cop could already see - in the open part of a bathroom you're already being watched by strangers. If you don't like other people watching you urinate surely you use a cubicle. If the cop busts down the door you've probably got bigger problems.
Not really. You're just going to enable micromanagement and reduce police effectiveness.
It means that you'll have denial-of-service for high crime minority neighborhoods or other areas where there's a higher risk of liability. It also makes neighborhood policing less effective -- who is going to talk to the beat cop when every interaction with him is going to be recorded and stored somewhere?
It also means that the policeman becomes a surveillance tool. Every time a cop steps into a building, everything is being filmed and recorded. The policeman's discretion to ignore petty things is going to be dramatically narrowed in scope.
It also means that we're going to waste billions of dollars on recording millions of hours of nonsensical video. The NYPD has 10,000 cops working at any given time, which would generate millions of hours of video every week -- video that would need to the kept if were to be useful in dealing with complaints. (In NY, you have several months to file a suit or complaint)
Sure, the policeman becomes a surveillance tool of sorts, but I'll trade the minuscule amount of time I'd ever be in view of such a camera for a guarantee that 100% of every officer's activity is recorded.
And what happens when these videos are leaked to the press, or some hair-brained politico wants to post them up on his mugshot website.
Accountability is great, but so is innocent until proven guilty. Hopefully systems will be put in place to curb abuse, but I doubt it.
How is it a crime against privacy? The police are Constitutionally-authorized to enter your home with a warrant, arrest you, take down all your information, etc. Having or not having a camera affects nothing, except that sometimes, a camera is more accurate in recording details that could be important in the prosecution and defense of the case.
Perhaps you have a visceral reaction to the thought of things being visually captured by the government? You should read up on what happens when a dead body is found in a home.
Note that it is not a violation of anyone's privacy. Police interactions with the public cannot be private, with the only exception being undercover police work or other times when the identity of the other person must be protected as in the case of a minor. These cameras can and will prevent petty (and egregious) abuses of power that American police have grown used to getting away with. Right now there are insufficient safeguards against police misconduct, and ubiquitious cameras would be a good step toward making those safeguards sufficient.