So have any of the Tesla owners here ever been in Oakland, California? If they legally park somewhere and come back to find their Tesla missing–don’t immediately think of it being stolen–instead it might be helping FIGHT CRIME!!!
Isn’t that wonderful!
That’s almost a “I’m not even mad” moment. Though it would be incredibly annoying.
It actually makes sense. The cameras don’t upload to the cloud–just the USB stick (there’s a separate process that uploads self-driving imagery to Tesla’s servers). And the car wouldn’t know that it needed to preserve the clips if a crime had happened–they get overwritten after a while if they aren’t manually saved.
Might be worthwhile to add a mechanism can prompt any Teslas within a certain radius to preserve clips that happened within a certain timeframe. Then the cops can request the clips at leisure once they track down the owners. That would require some support from Tesla, though, and some kind of online portal for cops.
Actually requesting the footage directly could also be possible but there’s huge privacy implications there.
Yeah, I suspect it’s easier for cops to just seize the car as potential evidence, rather than go through any kind of request process (including asking the driver, since the driver might not be amenable).
It looks like it happened three times and all of them shootings/murders. The cars would have to have Sentry Mode turned on. Sentry Mode eats up battery so I don’t use it.
I don’t like the precedent at all. Why not boot the car with a note to call the cops instead of taking the whole thing?
Why do they need to take the car at all? If the cops have a warrant, can’t they just get into the car where it is and access the USB stick?
Thinking about it a bit…. A cop or lawyer may correct me but it’s a pain in the ass to get a warrant and it takes time. If it’s “evidence” it can simply be “collected”.
Edit: I just self reported. This is has nothing to do with self driving but it’s interesting and should be moved to a different thread.
Same.
I found it does record if you have sudden braking events. Got a nice video of us nearly hitting a deer. Inches.
Because they don’t have a warrant. Is it just me that sees this as a HUGE 4th Amendment violation?
An extremely important line from the article:
However, if the owners can’t be located, officers obtain search warrants and tow the EVs into evidence.
They’re not just jacking cars and rummaging through the cameras willy nilly. They’re getting warrants only if the owners can’t be found.
If you read the article it turns out that in the first case- the car wasnt towed.
In the 2nd case, the police got warrants for three cars, one of them a Tesla. Also there was a CCTV camera. The police got enough evidence to arrest, but not known from which car or camera.
In the third case, the murder occurred in the Tesla, so of course it was towed for evidence, just like any other vehicle would have been.
So, pretty much this is a scare headline and bullshit. It isnt just Tesla’s, and in only one case were cars towed for camera evidence, ant two were other makes.
Correct
I have changed the title to reflect that it’s not just about Teslas.
Who is paying for the towing and impounding for days or weeks of the cars? What if the car is damaged while towing? Who pays for that? (I have had my car damaged by being towed…tore off a side mirror and badly scraped the paint on the roof…their response was it was like that when they found the car and I could not prove otherwise).
I love watching YT videos of “First Amendment Auditors” filming the police. Sometimes the police will approach the auditors and say something along the lines of, “We are going to have to confiscate your camera because it contains film-footage evidence of the crime we are investigating.” Each time, the auditors decline, and the police eventually back down. If the video has a narrator, the narrator will always mention that you (as a bystander) are not required to hand over film footage to the police if you’re filming them in their course of duties. What’s the straight dope on this?
Right, thus my question - if they have a warrant, why can’t they just get the USB drive without towing the car?
In the first case, the police obtained a warrant and were starting to tow the car when the owner returned. In all three cases, the warrant affidavits specifically mentioned the possibility of obtaining video footage from the cars. It might not be a rash of requests yet, but it isn’t bullshit. From the warrant affidavit for the first car:
“I know that Tesla vehicles contain external surveillance cameras in order to protect their drivers from theft and/or liability in accidents,” officer Kevin Godchaux wrote in the search warrant affidavit obtained by the Chronicle.
Another quote from law enforcement:
“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.
Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”
“It’s the most drastic thing you could do,” he acknowledged.
This article is a little more complete and less sensational.
My understanding is if the police can reasonably say it is part of their investigation of a crime they can seize a recording as evidence of that crime.
They cannot take your recording just on a whim. They need to be able to articulate a reason why it was necessary.
That said, I think that is a low bar they need to get over. Even if wrong it will amount to a whoopsie and no repercussions to the police. They’ll take your stuff and you need to work to get it back.
The owner.
The owners insurance company.
The owner can sue or put in a claim against the city, but good luck in Oakland.
But since in the third case, the murder occurred IN the car, it would be impounded for evidence, camera or no.
That will require entering the car, which may be easy enough if the owner is present to let them in. If they’re going to force entry, I’d much rather the car be in a police impound lot after that happens, than just left on the street someplace.
Another big issue, which if the police are familiar with how Teslas work is an important reason: Teslas don’t save an hour of recording, they save recordings made in the last hour, which is a very important distinction. So when the car is parked and turned off, any recordings made in the last hour of driving are saved. When the car is turned back on (for example, by opening the door), any recordings older than an hour are deleted, unless they were explicitly saved (through manual or automatic methods).
Sentry mode is similar. It will save the previous hour of recordings, plus any 10 minute period in which an event occurs. So even if sentry mode recorded an event, the video file may have been deleted by the time the evidence is going to be collected.
The deleted videos may be able to be recovered, which means that the USB drive should really go into the hands of an expert, rather than just some random cop who’s going to plug into a laptop to copy the files.
Good luck anywhere in the US. The police are pretty much not responsible for damage they cause. See any number of cases where a swat team destroys some innocent person’s house because a fugitive might be inside.
Or they destroy your house looking for your illegal cannabis plants, and all you have are legal orchids, but meanwhile, your equipment, walls, doors, etc. have been destroyed as they look for that secret compartment. Tough shit to you.
If you are in the habit of backing up your video to the cloud (many are, these days, if i were “auditing” the police, i certainly would be) there’s really no reason not to give them a copy if they assert it might help their investigation.