LAPD Body Cam Footage Can't Be FOIA'ed; Used In Court Cases Only
from the and-this-fixes-what? dept
The Los Angeles Police Department is getting ready to deploy 7,000 body cameras. That's (mostly) good news. Body cams have the potential to deter bad behavior both by cops and by those they interact with. It's not a complete fix for police misconduct but it's far better than allowing things to continue to run as they have for so many years.
The first 800 cameras have been financed by private donors, including director Steven Spielberg and the Dodgers organization. While traditional public funding would likely have been available, this one-time fundraiser has allowed the process to move much faster than running it through the usual city channels.
This is also good news as 22 donors fronted $1.5 million, showing there's significant public interest in seeing police officers outfitted with body cameras. Now, here comes the bad news.
Privacy-minded groups like the ACLU -- while applauding the move towards greater accountability -- have expressed valid concerns about citizens being caught on camera. It's looking for the crafting of policies that will prevent the distribution of footage to "YouTube and TMZ," as well as safeguards against collected video being passed around departments for the amusement of police officers.
There are also unanswered questions concerning access within police departments. For instance: should officers have access to footage they've captured? -- Being allowed to do so may result in cops aligning their reports with their recordings. While that is a concern, there's no reason to believe officers shouldn't have access to applicable footage when writing reports -- but that does leave the door open for post-incident narrative-massaging. It will be up to those policing the police to determine whether the footage matches the story. That's part of the internal structure, unfortunately, and it's part of what keeps these cameras from being a better solution to the police misconduct problem. Independent reviews will be necessary, but there's been no indication yet that the LAPD is leaning that way.
The really bad news is the fact that the LAPD has opted to almost completely remove the public from the equation.
[LAPD Police Chief Charlie] Beck also said Tuesday that the footage would not be released to the public and would be available only through criminal and civil court proceedings.And there goes the accountability. It's likely this move was prompted by certain activists in other cities who have placed FOIA requests for all body cam footage in perpetuity. This is an understandable reaction, but there is a middle ground that doesn't seem to have been contemplated. Limitations could be amended into local Freedom of Information statutes that would prevent overly-broad requests such as these. (And, of course, this too has the potential for abuse...)
As it stands now, body cam footage will only be viewed in a courtroom. This provides for almost zero accountability. The deployment of 7,000 body cams loses its deterrent effect if officers know that footage won't be seen unless it's showing their side of the story (criminal cases) or working against them in civil suits. Civil suits obviously aren't a deterrent, considering how many have been filed, how often settlements have been paid and how often officers are granted at minimum partial immunity in civil cases.
The LAPD may be ahead of the curve when it comes to full-blown body cam programs but if this doesn't change, the impact will be negligible.
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Forecast for 2015: More killer cops, more protests and riots; likely to persist well into 2016 and possibly beyond.
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Re:
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Or are you assuming that video evidence not backing the State's position will disappear? THAT is the real issue - the cops are only accountable if the people maintaining the archive aren't willing to disappear the evidence if it looks bad for the police (and, as a secondary issue, if judges are inclined to start throwing out cases where there ought to be video evidence but "oh my camera wasn't on" or "oh, we lost that video" or "oh, we overwrote that backup tape by accident".)
But the FOIA won't help that at all, it'll just change the point at which the inconvenient video gets ditched, no?
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Not 'if', but 'when' and 'how often'
Cops are already willing to take the phones and cameras of those filming them to delete damning footage, if they own the computers the videos are stored on that will just make it all the easier for them to do a little 'creative editing'.
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If we don't make access physically difficult (versus administratively difficult) it is inevitable that these videos will end up in databases the way license plate scans have. And ten years down the road when Moore's law has kicked up our computational power up by another 100x they'll be running facial recognition, voice recognition, engine-sound recognition, gait-recognition, etc on the videos and data-mining the F out of it so that it becomes a tool for oppression worse than no video at all.
There are a lot of valid reasons to make the video available to the police - better supervision, training (replay their own mistakes as well as study the mistakes of others), etc. But, everything in life is a trade-off and the price of those minor beneficial uses will be state abuse of the camera footage.
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Re: Victims
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The only technological weak spot now is preventing the video encryption service from leaking the key before it is wiped (unique key per video). One solution to that is to use public key cryptography so the video encryption service only ever has half the key - the other half is distributed beforehand. The only problem with that is you cannot use a separate key for each video, so one order to unlock one video exposes the key and can be used on any other video.
But either solution is better than nothing, and definitely much better than entrusting the key(s) to any one entity.
You do raise a good point about giving the police a tool to review and correct mistakes, but they already have other ways to do this, and I'm not sure how serious they are about using videos to train.
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Doesn't matter anyway
It's my estimate that the number one cause of evidence loss or destruction today is government officials covering up their wrongdoing.
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In any event the ubiquity of citizen video devices is at the point now that body cams are not going to be the only video evidence that will be available and the LEO's cannot control the one they never took.
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"no your honour the man I shot was attacking me with a chainsaw, don't believe your lying eyes that I shot an unarmed man according to the video evidence"
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Says who?
Any time a government employee (no matter how lofty their title) unilaterally makes up a "rule", our very first question should be: "Says who?"
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"Says who?"
Of coursed we should try to issue him directives through those who issue him the gun, but the DoJ has lately been unilaterally siding with their own enforcement officers.
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Re: "Says who?"
Where exactly does it say the DoJ gets to forever and amen be the sole decider in such matters? Says who? And while you're at it, show me where. :-)
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Gewaltmonopol des Staates
So to take back the power of force from the DoJ, you only need muster up a greater force. Or, as most oppressed-and-overpowered revolutionary groups do, trick the state forces into destroying themselves, or into situations in which your force is multiplied.
The DoJ doesn't function based on what is right. The DoJ functions on what serves the DoJ the best. And when that conflicts with what serves the state or the people, it's gone rogue.
Feel free to deride them or their behavior. Feel free to intervene. The problem is that the DoJ is the biggest tiger in the jungle.
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Re: Says who?
On the other hand, the California Court of Appeals has found that
So the scope of the exemption is limited. And then the California constitution provides the right to open access to records which requires that exemptions be narrowly construed while regulations allowing access be broadly construed. In short, Beck is speaking hopefully, but I believe this will have to be decided in court if he tries to stick to his fiat.
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We've seen this before...
So it's no surprise that the deployment of bodycams goes the same route.
I think cameras should be made public access. Streamed / recorded / hosted to the public by a neutral third party.
And that's why the mere installment of the cams is only an eensy-weensy-teensy step towards law enforcement accountability.
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Time for Citizen Cams - direct record to internet
Say they press a button that says, something's happening, if I don't stop the push, then automatically post, with GPS coordinates.
See how long it takes for the criminal cops, or petty government officials get nailed.
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So we can all get to watch when a policeman knocks on a family's door and tells them that their 17 year old daughter just threw herself in front of a high-speed train. And we can drool over the DV call or the kid mauled by a pack of pitbulls? Or we can watch as the body parts are extracted from a car wreck and then we can be thrilled as we recognize the license plate as our son's or even better go tell the neighbor that they need to come quick and look because that looks just like their teenage son's left leg?
Really? On the internet for perpetuity?
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The price of freedom is something something...
And yes, public access to police videos may allow for a bit of drooling by people who fetishize dog-mauled kids, or mothers in shock. As if they didn't already have enough to drool over.
Public access bodycams might also get police officers to brush up on their confrontational manners. I bet a buck-o-five that places like Ferguson that have high racial tensions, teen suicides and dog maulings are managed by officers with the same aplomb they handle jaywalkers, crazies and cigarette-mongers. Only now, their professionalism can be critiqued by the general public, for good or ill.
I stand by my original position, that bodycam footage should be streamed, collected and archived on the internet for perpetuity. Agreed, that may mean the world gets exposed to a tiny bit more gore that will be shared on /b/ than they already do. I think the accountability of our state-sanctioned enforcers might be worth it by magnitudes.
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