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David Kravets writes that US Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) says police departments nationwide should require their officers to wear body cameras in order to qualify for the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding they receive each year. "Everywhere I go, people now have cameras," said McCaskill during a question-and-answer session with voters in her home state of Missouri. "And police officers are now at a disadvantage because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."
Only a small number of US police departments have outfitted their officers with body cameras, including forces in Fresno, California; Oakland; Rialto, California; Pittsburgh; Salt Lake City; and Cincinnati. A recent study with the Rialto Police Department showed that use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints have been dramatically curtailed since the department began wearing body cams [PDF].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 28 2014, @01:26PM
A good idea, on the condition that:
- All recordings should be immediately, automatically and securely transmitted to some kind of independent, unbiased, non-commercial archival office. This new organisation would answer exclusively to the courts, not the police, and would be charged exclusively with maintaining the integrity and privacy of the data they collect. They would then make relevant recordings equally available to all parties involved in any particular case (ie, both the prosecution and defence)
- Any incidence of cameras being conveniently switched off / 'malfunctioning' / blocked should be reported by above office and then promptly investigated. Punishment for deliberately or negligently failing to record while on duty should be significant.
(Score: 1, Troll) by bob_super on Thursday August 28 2014, @03:35PM
If only someone had thought of investing taxpayer dollars in a safe government location dedicated to gathering and holding massive amount of citizen's private digital information...
"answer exclusively to the courts"? Dang! Gotta need more pork to build a second one then. For convenience, I propose that we build it next door to the current one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 28 2014, @03:44PM
More than that:
(1) Access to a recording should require a full-blown warrant, not just a court clerk signing off, or a national security letter.
(2) Without a warrant there is absolutely no access at all, and that includes automated access like facial recognition, speech recognition, license plate scanning, etc.
(3) Inevitably someone will decide that such a huge store of data is "too valuable to waste," so to prevent anyone changing the rules at a later date, no recordings are stored in the clear. They should be encrypted and the only copy of the keys are held by a 3rd party who only gives them up in response to a full-blown warrant from #1 above
(4) Without a warrant, recordings must expire. Somewhere on the order of 1 year. This policy is to reduce the chilling effect on citizens of a permanent record of everything they do in the vicinity of the police. The older the recordings the less likely they are to be useful for a legitimate investigation anyway.