Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras
Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras
Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Well, simple solution is when there is a camera defect or footage was "mysteriously lost", the police officer's testimony loses credibility.
This footage should be directly wired to the Ombudsman's office, not be held by the police in any capacity.
I’m more a fan of if the camera has a defect the officer takes full responsibility
Tell ya a little story... A story about a job I had. A job that's statistically more dangerous than being a cop. More likely you get killed doing it, more likely to kill someone else while doing it. And relevantly, this job included a camera...
That job was a long haul driver. I was looking to be a local driver, but most of those companies don't want new kids, so you gotta go do the long haul thing for a bit first. So I drove long haul for a year. They gave me a brand new truck, with a brand new camera in it.
Now this camera didn't have no off button. Didn't have an SD card in it. If I got pulled over, I had absolutely no way whatsoever to access the video from it. I had no control over this camera at all...
Well, sorta. I could access any "incidents" it saved. Those incidents would be that I took a corner too fast, or I strayed out of my lane for longer than 5 seconds, or I hit the brakes a little too heartily... then it would send some guy in a cubicle a message that i was a horrible driver and attach a 20 second video clip. Usually it was a light turned yellow and I was empty and knew I could stop quickly and chose to do so, which would upset mr safety guy a little but fuckin whatever. There was some points involved and a score, and it never amounted to jack, I drive local now :)
So anyway, that's the story, and hopefully the point, because it should be blatantly obvious what the point is ;)