Perhaps the greatest thing to come from technology in the past few decades with the rise of camera mobility, is the transparency and accountability that people have to be responsible for. If you steal something from a store and are caught on camera, or if someone simply records a video of you doing something illegal, there is no real way to argue against it. This is the same reasoning that has been used to implement body camera programs for police officers in the United States.
Making changes to police protocol can be very hard because of the unions that represent the officers, many of which usually don’t want to comply with some changes. In the past unions could resist change, but with so much bad press and selective editing of videos taken by pedestrians, they are easing up on body camera implementation. For officers who are actually doing their job correctly and acting with the correct protocol, body cameras are actually a benefit to them. They can prove their innocents if claims about brutality or inappropriate action are made. Those who act as thugs however are becoming held accountable.
In the last month alone we have seen two prime examples of why body cameras are so effective. The first one was with a girl from Burlington Vermont who claimed she was sexually assaulted by an officer on facebook after being arrested. The police took to respond by releasing the full video of what happened via body cam, which completely shot down the claim and showed the woman had been completely incompliant and even her father condemned her behavior. The second story comes from Baltimore where an officer who thought the body camera was not on, planted drugs on a scene and then pretended to find them and charged someone with possession.
Both these types of cases happen on a daily basis in the United States, but without body cameras, the guilty party might not have come to light. The majority of people from the police unions that are suggesting that body cameras are a bad idea are doing so because they don’t want to be held accountable when they make big mistakes. They might claim it is expensive and a problem with funding, but billions are spent a year by stations arming themselves to the teeth with riot gear they will never need or use. Plus body cameras should be seen as an investment.
If officers are doing nothing wrong they will save millions in court cases against police stations across the United States. If our tax dollars are being spent to fund these stations that propagate police brutality and misconduct, then we should demand that everything they do be recorded. Those who do the right thing can be exonerated and those who commit misconduct can be held accountable, it is as simple as that. If we are going to risk lives and reputations on the word of what someone says, there should be evidence to back it up and body cameras help do this.
Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges
They should be recorded at all times. I also like the idea of having drones track them as they drive around and interact with the public.
Hey,
I understand the necessity to monitor police officers. But having them monitored by drones seems like too much. Wouldn't it be too expensive, a drone for an officer? Could use that money to organize educational events for the officers, and to hire psychologists to evaluate the applicants wishing to become police officers and see if they have any sort of radical background. Sort of like the evaluation made for jury selection in courts of law.
But still, I understand the necessity to monitor police officers, and agree with you on general terms.
Taser (wel, Axon now) offered leasing cameras and its cloud system for free to all the US. It was a captive business, typical of the corporate America, but it looks like that there is an interest in the private sector, so wait only a few years to see this happening.
I see it happening more and more just in my personal life, hopefully it carries on.
It doesn't make any sense for them not to at this point. The technology is so inexpensive it would be so easy to do. So often these cell phone videos don't tell the whole story, body cams would completely solve that problem
While I don't disagree with this, I also think it poses a major danger of "Monday morning quarterbacking". Where someone watches a video over and over again with no real risk to them or others hanging over their head, and THEN makes a decision of what the best response should have been.... while the officers had seconds to decide with zero "instant replay" to form their decision based on.
This is becoming more and more common in media as activist groups seek to vilify police officers to rally people (and thus money) behind their pet cause.
I agree, but I also think that perhaps disincentivizing the police from doing anything that is considered questionable isnt the worst move in the world. I think most people are rational enough to know when someone is far too much of a risk.
Yeah, I just think of those cops that shot a guy who got out of his car with his wallet in his hand.
It's night, it's dark, you see him reach for something even though you told him to keep his hands up, he produces a dark object from behind him... do you wait to see if he kills you/your partner before acting? Or do you shoot?
Cameras say "look, it was obviously his wallet!" when the headline told you it was a wallet, and you got to watch it until you saw it. In that moment though... could they have known?
Borrowing a line from Spiderman's movie, "with great power comes great responsibility".
A camera is a monitoring device which will help in recording a police officer's duty hours - a sort of real-time visual log, so to say. Sure, it will reduce crime on behalf of errant police officers. But my only fear is that like everything else, there will be loopholes and once they start using those loopholes, only the good officers will go by the rules when the camera is on. So it will be back to square one.
But of course, it is a good suggestion and it all depends on how it is implemented. It can be made an effective way of preventing crime by the police.
Good post, following for more!
In the future always on cameras and dynamic video uploading to the cloud should be standard for all policing. All citizens should also fill free to live stream their encounters with police and authority. Great article upvoted resteemed and following
In most countries are are free to film police on their duty. Which does not stop them from saying the opposite in many cases.
And no, filming half of the daily life and upload to the cloud - aka everyone who wants to have it - is a surveillance state, but not good police practice.
I agree every officer needs a camera and unfortunately the officer should not have control to turn it off.
they are online almost all of the time , but there are ways that an officer can obscure the view ect. The way the drug planting officer was caught is he turned off the camera, but they have a 30 second buffer time to shut off and turn on.
I'm very for this @calaber24p
Totally agree, theres a small chance that police accountability will increase and thus decrease brutality and corruption.
What is the point of police at all?
To keep the peace. To up hold the law. To keep people honest and to correct when crimes are committed. Lets say you are robbed, who are you going to call, @lightproject ? The ghost busters? The fact that you asked that questions bring into question your motives and intelligence.
I have been robbed several times and reported police always, and guess what? Never got my stuff back. Do you think police are magic? Yes I understand, when you are robbed you get pissed off and the act of calling them calms you down, you can even talk to them and rant a bit. But does it change anything in the end?
I too have been robbed, didn't get my stuff back, but they caught the thief. You know that my question was more rhetorical. It's not about calming down, it's about trying to catch the criminals. Sure, some crimes go unpunished, but do you honestly think we should not report them?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The police are enforcers, plain and simple. The law says "Obey" and if you don't you get the boot of enforcement slammed into your face.
There is NOBODY to enforce the law when the law "makers" and "enforcers" do not obey the laws.
Nobody.
The law is designed to keep poor people in line.
Most police officers welcome this type of tech. They are glad to have it on their side, as the vast majority of the time, they are trying to do the right thing. Video does not lie, it shows what happened, and with this type of tech, we will find the bad ones, and remove them, and hopefully reward the goods ones.
We shouldn't depend on the state (government) to provide our cops. Cops should be accountable to us directly has private employees.
You are absolutely right. Even drivers must have a Dash camera in their vehicles
One of the main problem solving is that even with body cams, when you have the same office in question investigating itself, the results are usually "we found no wrongdoing" or "the officer's actions were justified". While I agree that body cams can help with transparency, I think that the investigations into officer related killings shouldn't be internal investigations.
"...billions are spent a year by stations arming themselves to the teeth with riot gear they will never need or use. Plus body cameras should be seen as an investment." Completely agree that the body cams have the potential to keep everyone safer, and are a better preventative measure than riot gear. Nice post.
I agree. Every officer should wear a body camera. But I would go further. I would want them trained in negotiation, mediation and some form of martial arts/self defense.
I agree , body cams alone will not work , for one way too many times they get turned off or a malfunction is cited , police in this country need a re education and that they don't want to talk about , most don't even know the laws their supposed to uphold , if you are asked by a cop and you refuse to answer , you get called uncooperative , if you refuse a cop to search your car , you get arrested , they will state probable cause or manufacture it , now that being said not all cops are bad but way too many have a us versus them attitude where they think they are in the right and you have none , that's a problem , with the worlds highest population of incarcerated people ,somebody should already have caught on , but the prison industry is a huge moneymaker so locking people up for stupid things just feeds then machine that much more , when a police department or officer gets sued for gross injustice , it's not the cop that pays , nor the department , it's tax dollars , they roll the cost to you , police people skills are non existent , the excuse fearing for my life justifying an immediate leveling of a gun and shooting shows their lack of being able to deal and comprehend situations and would rather shoot and end any potential situation , excessive and overwhelming force is another issue , when it takes 5 -6 cops to subdue a person, they lack some basic hand to hand techniques to deal with the situation , the process for becoming a cop are a joke , because if your intelligent and score too high on their entry level exams they don't want you , they are looking for doers and followers not thinkers , this impact's the basic police mentality right from the get go , other countries have way less police issues than we do yet we are supposed to be the world's greatest , reality is we are far from it and with the rise of the police state it will get way worse before it gets better .
In theory, I like the idea of police all having body cameras. When something goes wrong, whether its a complaint that cops said something inappropriate or threatening or an alleged incident of police brutality, having video footage at least hypothetically could quickly shut down false accusations and make investigating the allegations more open-and-shut. But in practice, I have a few concerns.
First, if the cameras are always on, that's a lot of footage. Many state freedom of information acts would likely require police to release essentially any footage that was requested from the public. That's going to be a lot of additional FOIA requests for police departments to respond to. They'll have to look through the footage for anything that needs to be blurred out to protect privacy (addresses, children's faces, bystanders, license plates, etc). The man hours on that -- even if you outsource it to low-wage workers in developing countries -- is going to add up fast.
Second, is how the footage ends up being used. I can already see opportunists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton requesting tons of footage, selectively editing it, and basically putting out hits on officers. We already saw this with the Rodney King riots. The admittedly brutal footage that was shown was edited by the media outlet that first received a copy. They took out the first few seconds where things originally escalated with King. The jury members who acquitted the officers later said that those early seconds were key to their decision. But the public had formed its own opinion -- based on footage edited down to arguably make it more incendiary -- on what happened, long before they got to hear that there was more to the story.
Third, and I think there are ways to address this, but I worry about the possibility that, particularly during the early adoption phase, officers will not always know when to turn on their body cameras. If an officer is walking the streets patrolling and something happens, what if there isn't time to smack the button and turn on the camera? And then when things go bad, it looks suspiciously self-serving that the camera wasn't on?