I’m supportive of cameras, but I think high def fottage should only be kept for a few months, if not notable.
I support penalising officers who have both their cameras ‘malfunction’ during an incident.
In predominately black neighborhoods the police force needs to be predominately black.
Level of distrust for authority and abuse of it is already high in black neighborhoods. A personality predisposition for police to be inappropriately authoritative is already high.
The combination of these two factors makes it nearly impossible for a white cop to police a black neighborhood.
Beyond that, every interaction should be videotaped as exhaustively as possible. If we can put video cameras in taxis, we can put them in police cars. When an intervention of any kind is undertaken, video cameras are the most impartial mechanism to resolve differences in perspective.
That’s over $3,300 per cop. :dubious: I would have thought it could have been done for less than half that.
The cost of digital storage is very low. Why not decades? Otherwise people could wait by just a few months for the footage to be erased, then file a false accusation against a cop.
Nashville, at least its outer suburbs like Belle Mead, actually has a subscription police and fire department (though the former is probably supplemental to actual Nashville PD). The situation may have changed since my family lived there in the early 70s, but I doubt it. The subscription fire department made headlines a few years ago for letting a non-subscriber’s house burn while making sure the fire didn’t spread to subscribing neighbors.
Washington, DC has approximately 13 separate police forces within its boundaries. Some are private and neighborhood-specific, while others are connected to specific cabinet departments.
I don’t advocate either of these examples as models for the rest of the country to follow, but mention them to point out that there is precedent for this sort of thing.
Did you know that ankle bracelet monitors were inspired by similar devices first mentioned in the Spider-Man newspaper comic strip? On balance, they turned out to be a pretty good idea. From the same source, how about some sort of web/net cannon as a non-lethal alternative to guns or tasers? If they miss and hit the wrong person, the local PD will be on the hook for dry cleaning instead of hospital bills.
Welcome to the 21st century, XT. Most of us have been here for a decade and a half, now. In this century, high-quality digital cameras only cost about a hundred bucks.
Yeah, this was my reaction too. We’re not proposing to send a Cops tv crew out with every officer all the time.
The United States has way more than 13 total cable companies. Yet, in any given area, the number of companies who will offer you cable television and internet service is 0-2. That’s because it’s a natural monopoly.
Do any of these subscription police services compete with each other over the same coverage area? How many competing services patrol the same area of town?
In other words, you not only have no fucking idea of what you are talking about, you have no fucking idea of what I was saying either. Thanks for the input on which century it is…very helpful.
(And the 400k for cameras was FROM THE CITE, genius)
To be fair, from seeing how companies exist that can archive and serve petabytes of video to anyone, anywhere, almost instantly with rare failures, it probably seems as if the storage and camera problem is nonexistent.
If the cops just used smartphones with extended batteries and the cameras set to record duct taped to their uniform, and they uploaded all the videos to youtube (set to public, why not) automatically using some janky app written in a code jam…the solution would “work” and it would be very very cheap. It honestly might be more reliable than it sounds.
I understand the reasoning behind using purpose-built cameras and evidence vaults run by a credible organization, but when you compare to the costs of doing it the way ordinary people would do it, the costs are insane.
It’s like saying that because you can buy a laptop on Tiger Direct for $200 what’s the justification for the military or police/fire rescue to need one that costs $4k? And before you roll your eyes, I’ve actually seen elected officials pose this exact question. It’s all about the requirements. Sure, you COULD just give the cops cell phones and store the video on some cheesy NAS or upload it right to YouTube and save a ton of money. Good luck with changing all of the regulations and requirements to conform to doing stuff the way you think it should be, because I’ve never been able to do it. I guess it’s because I don’t know what century this is.
The cops in that cite didn’t spend what they did for those cameras because they wanted to spend a ton more than they had too (I can guarantee this, since I know what cops DO want to spend tons on, and it has zero to do with technology or cameras), they bought the cameras that met the requirements…often conflicting requirements from the freaking public, Federal Government, State and Local Government, various legal or other advocacy groups, etc etc, who wants everything and is willing to spend nothing, and is freaking clueless and thinks ‘well, why can’t they just use their cell phones to “video tape” encounters? I mean, it works for me and is pretty cheap, right??’
sigh At any rate, I’m just trying to give a real world view point on this. There is a reason why cops don’t do this, and it’s not because they are either stupid or because they just want to spend a ton of money. And there is a reason why IT guys like me don’t just do it the cell phones and YouTube way either…I mean, I get paid to do this stuff, and it’s not like I don’t know what a cell phone or YouTube is. It’s what I do. I deal with this crap all the time. I also have every digital toy you can think of, so I’m painfully aware of what century it is, what the technology can and can’t do, and how all of this stuff works, and it’s annoying as hell when someone who doesn’t even understand the point I was trying to make comes in with a snooty remark that shows that they don’t know or care about any of that real world stuff.
So, here is a good article dealing with some of the issues of this technology. It goes into some of how fragmented the requirements are, and how a lot of police departments are trying to figure out what they should and can do. It also goes into problems such as storage, chains of custody of the evidence and the privacy of those being filmed (and who gets to see that evidence…it’s ironic that some folks here want to basically have this stuff stored by private companies who will be able to view, sort, and sift through this evidence because usually outsourcing this stuff to private companies would be verboten on this board, but I guess not when it comes to digital video of potential crimes or other privacy stuff :p).
There are multiple groups pulling in multiple ways, and of course state and local requirements and regulations/best practices/SOPs/whims of the local agencies vary widely. So, when someone is talking about putting this technology on all police officers you are going to first need to actually deal with all the real world mess and decide how important the video is, how long it needs to be stored for, where it can be stored, who can view it, how to maintain chains of custody so that if the video is used in court it’s admissible…and a host of other things. The way it is today, it’s going to cost a boat load because you can’t simply wave your magical fiat wand and brush all those questions aside and just give the coppers cell phones and 3G/LTE access to post the videos on YouTube, despite the fact that people do this all the time. Anyway, read the article if any of you are interested…but know that it’s actually even more complex than they make it, and that agencies starting to do this are really out on the edge of the envelop and making it up as they go along, and what’s really going to decide if how they are doing it works is when this stuff really starts going to court, and videos of people committing crimes or having confrontations with the police become more widespread and groups like the ACLU and other advocacy groups weigh in.
Strictly speaking, even a janky video that isn’t always there is still better than taking the word of someone who has every reason to lie, and a biased viewpoint. Every suspect who has ever been in a fight always says the other party started it, police training doesn’t make someone not a human being. People have gone to prisons over “confessions” that no one but the investigating officer heard, and there was no corroborating evidence that pinned the crime on just this person. Even if the officer were honest, why should you put the jury into a situation where they either find a cop’s word to be “beyond a reasonable doubt” or they let a potentially guilty person go?
TLDR, the smartphone + youtube solution is higher quality and more reliable than the BW VHS dashboard cameras that were used for decades. With the VHS dash cam, the tapes can be “lost”, the quality is atrocious, the incident might not happen in it’s field of view, there’s no geotagging, the video files aren’t searchable, the resolution is terrible, and so on.
The cost of storing an hour of footage is very low, but when you multiply it by the number of officers, the long hours they work and the premium for secure data, it adds up quick.
Obviously you’ll be able to store more in the future once the price goes down, but storing for a limited time is a cheap way to get the ball rolling.
And audio is a teensy, tiny fraction of video. Also, video codecs exist that can shrink video down absurdly. The quality gets pretty bad but it could still be enough to disprove simple accusations. So you could keep the audio stream and a compressed version of the video and shrink the file size enormously.
OK, so the law mandates very strict requirements for police equipment, and the manufacturers who make equipment that meets those requirements charge an arm and a leg for it. Both of those can be changed. There’s no reason that you couldn’t make police cameras that do what you need of them for very cheaply. We are, after all, talking about improvements to be made over the status quo.
Heck, if a camera isn’t reliable enough, then just wear two of them. That’d turn a 1% failure rate into a 0.01% failure rate, for only twice the cost.
Heh. Preaching to the choir. I thought of this for aircraft engines, for the same argument. Doesn’t work in the case of aircraft because an engine failure can destabilize a twin engined plane, and it creates major noise problems if the engines are in line with each other.
That’s the correct solution. 2 mass produced, made in china, moderate quality cameras (given the fundamental components are so cheap, there’s no reason to skimp too far, but you could mount a decent sensor, sorta-ok lens, a decent battery, and all on a circuit board using Japanese capacitors and not really drive the cost up much. Mount this cheapbox in a generic molded plastic casing). You can do the same thing when you store the video. Instead of buying gold-standard server rack space guarded by marines with tons of expensive backup equipment (and using high end servers), store the video in 3 separate bargain basement places. That’s how google does it.
Certainly they could be changed. Can you change them? I can’t. And there are other issues than cost of the cameras or the reliability. As noted already, the cameras are actually the cheapest part of the equation (even the $400k cited up thread was less than half of what the police admitted to the project costs).
Look, I’m on board. I think the police should have cameras and video of encounters, both on their persons and in their cars. I also think they should have reliable radio and wireless data communications…it seems ridiculous that in today’s world they don’t have those things. I’ve actually advocated for these technologies at both the county police level and the state level in the past (we budget for a lot of this every year in fact…and every year it gets rejected). But the reality is that even waving aside the money issue, which is probably going to be a show stopper right there in all but the richest police departments, there are other issues that need to be straightened out before you can even start to seriously consider rolling something like this en masse to a large number of police.
It can, next year. And half that the following year. In short, data storage is next to free, and getting cheaper.
A million dollars worth of video can be stored – if past experience is a guide – for a thousand dollars in ten years, and $32 in fifteen.