Yes the economics question can be addressed in how this system is rolled out. If a state government mandates that all county sheriff departments must implement the system, setting the standards for its functionality, then requesting bids from private companies to implement a statewide solution, then the costs will dramatically decrease. Then when the ball is rolling more private development companies can bid for implementing systems for the rest of the local police departments following the strict interoperability requirements set by law.
But one thing that for sure we can all agree on surely is that it would be complete madness to have the police departments themselves develop and implement this system on their own volition. I mean, police departments certainly don’t design and manufacture their cruisers from scratch individually, so likewise this. Leave policing to the police and leave the technological development of online video recording and retrieval to the respective experts.
Having said that, the amount of video actually stored could dramatically be reduced by deleting the parts where nothing is happening. Recording the actual meaningful events could be automatically kept on file based on dispatchers actions, so all police sent to respond to a certain call will have their video kept, and any others officers that stumble onto the scene likewise. All this of course is trivially easy to implement using geocaching of police proximity to the scene, all automatically behind the scenes without any human action. And in fact I would extend this functionality to the general public, so if a civilian has a complaint they can request all video of all police within a certain proximity and time to be kept on file. This could be like an app, where all a person has to do is flag a time and place. All of this of course can only be economically feasible if people who are experts do this job and are completely unconnected financially and legally from the actual police force.
[QUOTE=The Niply Elder]
Having said that, the amount of video actually stored could dramatically be reduced by deleting the parts where nothing is happening.
[/QUOTE]
Who decides this? Who does the deleting? The police? The cloud storage company who holds it? How will the public KNOW that the video deleted is, indeed, showing nothing happening? And how will they be confident that the person or persons vetting the video are redacting it correctly to the benefit of all?
Oh, and how much is it going to cost to vet every police officers shift every day to get rid of all of the stuff where nothing happens?
I totally agree with you…it could be done, and if you could do it it would save a ton of space. The devil, however, is in the details and getting around all of those pesky regulations and statutes and whims of public officials and advocacy groups. Today, the way police are getting around these issues is either to not do it or to attempt to interpret all of this and formulate policy to implement it…and hope for the best. Eventually this stuff will all be worked out and challenged in court, there will be lawsuits from people on privacy grounds and lawsuits on the policy and implementation (info redacted to much, not redacted enough, allowed to fall into the public’s hands, etc), and we will have firm ground on which to base a workable system.
Deleting is done automatically unless anybody flags it for posterity, and flagging would be done automatically by the system used by the dispatchers, the officers themselves and the public at large. If a citizen has any interaction with the police, they can afterward, for example, file an electronic ticket to keep footage of all officers within a mile radius of a certain location on a certain time and date. Likewise, any by standing citizen would be able to flag any suspicious incident, be it police brutality, or be it an officer getting ambushed by gangmembers or whatever. It would create a system where anybody can report an incident and no one person can singlehandedly delete evidence. I know that the devil is in the details, but everything that I’ve described is trivial so far.
The system you’re describing is the one that already exists in the US and is the core of the problem – there is a widespread fear of crime among the public along with what another poster described as “uniform worship” that makes it almost impossible to prosecute police for deadly abuse of the powers that the populace is happy to grant them. There is also an underlying racist component wherein the demographic that is granting those powers is predominantly the white wealthy demographic that has the least to fear from police abuses, whose victims tend to be the poor and the minorities.
A murder trial shouldn’t be automatic, and it isn’t necessarily automatic for civilians, either, if the event seems like a clear case of self-defense. But there should be a murder trial if the event may have indeed been a murder. As it stands now the bar is just impossibly high for grounds to prosecute a police officer, and it hardly ever happens, no matter how egregious the circumstances. Even if every single fact in Darren Wilson’s testimony is correct, with no omissions of incriminating fact and no embellishment in his favor – which seems unlikely – it still seems to come down to the fact that he shot Michael Brown because he was mad as hell that this black dude had sworn at him and punched him. But apparently all that a cop has to claim to justify murder – and in some states, even an ordinary citizen – is the magic words “feared for my life”. You should have to do more than just utter the magic words – you should have to prove it.
I agree. Community outreach is critically important, and I’ve generally seen this implemented via community-friendly patrols where officers are on foot or on bicycles and can interact with the people on the street. As I noted in another thread, Ferguson was going in the opposite direction, actively participating in the DoD 1033 program that provides military war machines like armored vehicles to police departments.
The other part that the Ferguson police department managed to get exactly wrong was having an almost all-white police force in a community that was predominantly black, and in which blacks were overwhelmingly the dominant subjects of traffic stops and arrests. That’s pretty much a guarantee of racial tension, to put it mildly.
Body cameras were mentioned and that’s probably a third measure that would be useful. And a fourth one that I cite from observing what works elsewhere involves proactive department policies against racial discrimination. That would include, for instance, policies that discourage questioning or detaining people or engaging in traffic stops without a truly valid reason – policies, IOW, against the old “Driving While Black” syndrome. It seems the Ferguson PD did nothing like that, either.
So this is the atmosphere in which a white cop shoots a black kid, and then the police and public officials throw a protective shield around the cop, initially refuse to even identify him, and later decline to indict him. Is anyone surprised at the outcome?
The Ferguson police chief who accepted Darren Wilson’s resignation is now saying the he himself will not resign. I don’t think he should resign – I think he should be fired.
By myself? Of course not. I also can’t change departmental use of force policies, or beat schedules, or anything else anyone might suggest in this thread. But I can write letters to the politicians who can change things, and vote for the ones who say they will.
That’s an interesting way of saying “I disagree with your speculation, because my speculation is different”.
But my speculation is based on the very large number of police shootings that occur every year and would be valid even if Wilson’s testimony is precise and accurate, which is highly doubtful. That a 12-year old boy was just shot by police in a different incident just reinforces that fact. Furthermore, there is a growing number of news commentators (many of whom are white, BTW, like Piers Morgan and former prosecutor Nancy Grace) who think Wilson is outright lying about some of the key facts, which is certainly very plausible and makes his position even more indefensible.
It doesn’t matter whether Wilson is lying or not. Physical evidence shows that Brown was moving towards him, from about 30 feet away to about 8-10 feet away while quite a few witnesses testify that Wilson was shouting at Brown to stop. That’s after the altercation in the car where two shots already occurred. That all by itself justifies the shooting and shows that your assertion of “he shot Michael Brown because he was mad as hell that this black dude had sworn at him and punched him” is nonsense.
It seems like you are saying either:
[ol]
[li]Black people are unable to be effectively policed by white people because black people are racists.[/li][li]White people are unable to effectively police by black people because white police are racists.[/li][li]Some combination of both.[/li][/ol]
This attitude is racist.
Emphasis mine, and no, it doesn’t justify squat. You don’t shoot someone just because he’s doing something bad, but that’s pretty much what this attempt at rationalization comes down to. All this does is illustrate the root of the policing problem in America – trigger-happy cops who are more like Dirty Harry wannabes than community peacekeepers. The only thing that justifies lethal force is self-defense against lethal force and clear and imminent danger to life. This doesn’t even come close, but as already pointed out several times by several eloquent posters, cops getting away with murder is an everyday occurrence.
That’s nice, but back here in reality, all over the real world, police services understand the importance of being integrated with the community, of being perceived as neighbors and colleagues instead of domineering overlords. And that means, among many other things, having a police force that generally reflects the race, ethnicity, and language of the community they serve. Racism is when you have an almost all-white police force in a majority black community, and in constant conflict with it.
Once again, he wasn’t “doing something bad”. He tried to grab the policeman’s gun and physically attacked him, then kept approaching the policeman after the policeman repeatedly shouted at him to stop. In such a situation, police are authorized to use deadly force.
When a 300-lb 6’4" man who just physically attacked you and tried to get your gun is approaching you in spite of your gun trained on him and your shouts at him to stop - that’s a clear and imminent danger to life.
Unless, as some witnesses attest, he was making clear signs of an attempt to surrender. Not that I’m sure that he was, but it doesn’t seem clear at all to me that he necessarily wasn’t.
I’m not buying the storage of 8 hrs/day x 5 years. First of all, all that would need to be saved is the officer’s interaction with the public. Perhaps Loach or pkbites can tell us what percentage of their time is spent interacting with the public. Second of all, there can be limits set up that a video must be requested within a certain amount of time. Let’s say 90 days. So within 90 days I would need to request a copy of the video and at that time it goes into a permanent storage system. There can be many ways that money can be saved in this scenario and if not, how about a few more civil forfeitures to pay for it?
I’m not disputing what police are “authorized” to do – that’s just restating what the fundamental problem is, and why it’s practically impossible to prosecute a police officer in most such cases.
Whatever version of events one chooses to believe, it seems apparent that the events here proceeded through a series of escalations, and that both Wilson and Brown handled things very poorly. But Wilson is the one who’s supposed to be trained in these matters, and Brown, for all his size, was an 18-year-old kid. And the only reason Brown grabbed at Wilson’s gun is because Wilson had already unholstered it while still in the car and threatened to shoot him – this is from Wilson’s own testimony. It seems that Wilson started the encounter very confrontationally and, when Brown reacted violently, within seconds Wilson had his gun out. This is just really, really bad policing.
The part that concerns me was what occurred when Brown moved away and Wilson got out of the car. Yes, Wilson was in a dangerous situation, but it’s very far from clear that his life was at risk, and he had an extensible baton, Mace, and should have had a Taser but chose not to carry one but to rely on his gun instead. And by his own estimate backup was about 30 seconds away. Brown was being a belligerent idiot but that shouldn’t justify a death penalty; there’s no reason the kid had to die.
And he wouldn’t have died if his last act of stupidity (after physically assaulting a cop and trying to get his gun) wasn’t to advance at the cop who is pointing a gun at him and shouting at him to stop - thus presenting a clear and imminent danger to the cop.
Lots of stupid actions for which you may get killed do not “justify a death penalty”. If you see a cop and point a toy gun at him, does that “justify a death penalty”? Hell, how about cleaning a loaded gun - does that “justify a death penalty”? Yet people get killed doing either.
Unless, as some witnesses attest, he was making clear signs of an attempt to surrender. Not that I’m sure that he was, but it doesn’t seem clear at all to me that he necessarily wasn’t.
I don’t have a cite for this but I recall hearing on the radio that DC’s plan for trying out body cams was to have them turned on by the officer whenever they interact with the public, and to only store the videos 3 months unless they are flagged by a complaint or needed as evidence. Since much of a cops day is taken up with paperwork, and driving around, I imagine you would end up with an order of magnitude less than 10 hours of footage per cop per day, and three months seems like a reasonable window for filing a complaint.
With this method there is the danger that a cop could “forget” to turn on his camera when Tyrone “slipped” and broke his jaw while being helped into the patrol car, but if the penalties for failing to turn them on are severe enough hopefully compliance will be universal enough that a failure to turn the camera on will raise questions about the veracity of the officers version of events.
And I know several agencies that are doing the same thing…having the cops turn on their video recorders when something happens. And basically vet the video for upload to a server or storage system (or having the sergeants do it…or a clerk…or a duty officer, etc). At this point, no one really knows if that will or won’t be good enough or what the repercussions will be for making that arbitrary decision…or the other totally arbitrary decisions people are suggesting in this thread that the cops should do wrt video evidence. What I’ve tried and obviously failed to do in this thread is to underscore the complexities in doing this, and how that very uncertainty is going to add to the costs. People have basically handwaved that stuff away and focused on seemingly simple and seemingly common sense ways to get around this and lower the costs without actually thinking about how arbitrary their suggestions are wrt actual requirements and statutes and policy…none of which exists in any sort of coherent way to act as guidelines for agencies to build any of this stuff in anything like a cost effective way. As with the people suggesting the use of cheap camera systems and vetting the video to cut out all of the non-essential stuff, you could simply have the officers turn on their camera when they think something important is happening (or, like in the car video systems activate them when you activate the lights and siren system). Will that work? For certain definitions of ‘work’ it will, sure. Will it be good enough for the various groups who do or will care about this stuff in the future? Gods know…I sure don’t. What I can tell you is that in the real world a lot of agencies who don’t know and can’t blithely handwave away what MIGHT be required, the choice is between basically getting everything on video and then ensuring it’s treated like real evidence, or not doing this stuff at all…or, just doing what folks in this thread are doing, which is pulling the requirements and policy out of their asses based on economic reasons without regard to how knotty all of this is.
I’d be interested in seeing what DC based it’s own policies and requirements on wrt the system they deployed. AFAIK, only California has actually sat down and thought through some of the stuff I’ve tried to bring up here, and even they haven’t gotten a fixed policy yet. But at least they are thinking about it and not deciding stuff in an arbitrary or ad hoc fashion.
