LAPD's Body Cams To Be Synced To Taser Deployment
from the recorded-into-compliance dept
The Los Angeles Police Department is going to be compiling some pretty graphic footage in the near future, thanks to Taser International.
Los Angeles police on Tuesday ordered Tasers that, when used, automatically activate cameras on officers' uniforms, which will create visual records of incidents at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers.This is the functional synergy of buying your "less lethal" weapons and body cameras from the same company. A Bluetooth connection between the two engages the camera once the Taser's safety is disengaged. This should provide a fairly decent record of incidents involving this particular form of force, while simultaneously addressing fears that officers might forget to engage the camera during heated situations or lose valuable seconds turning them on manually.
The 3,000 new digital Taser X26P weapons record the date, time and duration of firing, and whether Taser wires actually strike suspects and how long the thousands of volts of electricity pulse through them.
That the device will also record key data about the Taser itself is also encouraging. Even if the camera angle is less than helpful, the captured metrics should give overseers a pretty good idea whether the use of force traveled into "excessive" territory.
On the downside, this is the LAPD, which has already stated that body camera footage will be available only via court proceedings. By cutting out the general public, the LAPD has removed a very important layer of accountability. And the incidents mentioned in the Reuters article as examples of public concern over police use of force (Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford) all notably did not involve the use of a Taser (Garner was choked to death, Brown and Ford were both shot). The new Taser/camera system closes the accountability gap for one particular area, but use of other types of force are still subject to officers' control of their body cameras.
The LAPD has proven in the past that its officers don't care much for being recorded, so the rollout of 7,000 body cameras needs to be treated with more skepticism than optimism. Widespread abuse of DOJ-mandated audio recording devices (missing/disabled antennas, deliberate disengagement) has been greeted by LAPD supervisors with timid hand slapping and "accountability is hard" complaints. There's no reason to believe certain officers won't be able to find a way around this new, automatic recording technology as well.
But, on a theoretical level, it's a better system than relying on officers themselves to engage recording devices before deploying Tasers. Its application in the real world will probably not be quite as foolproof as Taser's spokesman portrays it. And, even if it does roll out smoothly and work as advertised, we're still left with the unfortunate fact that the general public will have very limited access to either the Taser data or the automated recordings.
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Filed Under: body cameras, body cams, lapd, police, taser
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And the events leading up to the tasering?
Isn't all this going to do is show the suspects in full on seizure?
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Re: And the events leading up to the tasering?
1) Pull taser
2) Disengage safety to actually use the taser
3) Body camera snaps on
4) Camera records the officer tasering a stationary suspect whose hands are open and empty in the air, or a suspect lying face down on the ground with hand on the back of their head; as the officer shouts "Stop resisting!"
5) Officer claims they had to use their taser because the suspect was resisting arrest, resulting in a "resisting arrest" charge.
6) Resisting arrest charge gets dropped before it can be laughed out of court once people actually review the camera footage.
7) Suspect escapes an unjust charge, and the officer walks away with maybe a slap on the wrist.
Which is a marked improvement over the current sequence of events:
1) Pull taser
2) Disengage safety to actually use the taser
3) Officer tasers a stationary suspect whose hands are open and empty in the air, or a suspect lying face down on the ground with hand on the back of their head, to their heart's content; as the officer shouts "Stop resisting!"
5) Officer claims they had to use their taser because the suspect was resisting arrest, resulting in a "resisting arrest" charge.
6) Suspect walks away with either a plea bargain, or gets a slightly worse sentence than the plea bargain after being convicted of resisting arrest because the courts trust police officers. Officer walks away without so much as a slap on the wrist.
It's certainly not perfect, but it attempts to both automate, and mandate, recording of some valuable context for taser usage. Which can help stem that type of abuse, or at the very least provide some more accurate stats on frequency of taser usage.
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Re: Re: And the events leading up to the tasering?
How much would you like to bet that if cam is already on, 3) becomes:
Body camera snaps off
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Re: Re: Re: And the events leading up to the tasering?
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Re: And the events leading up to the tasering?
There are all kinds of things you can do. For example, competition fencing foils have little switches built into the tips to enable an electric scoring machine. One could presumably modify a baton in the same way.
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Re: Re: And the events leading up to the tasering?
That would be a really terrible design that would eliminate much of the good that the cameras could do. In this day and age, it would be cheap and easy to just allow continuous recording throughout the entire shift.
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Actions such as what have been mentioned already in this article are just a set up for ignoring what camera footage would bring out. In addition, only filming the moment of arming a taser does not tell you what transpired to reach that level. We've seen often enough that in many cases the officer himself escalates the circumstances and that will not be part of the record.
This is not setup to be accountability, this is set up to continue to hide the abuse.
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bluetooth connection
Of course then the cops would claim that any phone could be interfering with blah blah blah BANG
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Better Yet
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Re: Better Yet
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Re: Better Yet
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Instead of forcing the camera to activate in case it had inadvertently been turned off before an encounter (with "on" being the default), LEOs will start to argue that the automated system frees them from any responsibility or obligation to have the cameras running at all unless a taser is being used.
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The problem with this, is that the camera will not capture how the situation arrived at the point that the officer decided to use a taser. That is, it is possible for an officer to provoke the situation that warrant use of the taser without the provocation being recorded.
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Privacy
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better than nothing, I suppose
You want to use the taser? You have to be able to record - it should not be an option.
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Re: better than nothing, I suppose
Since the contents are already out of the public eye, simply record every minute of the work shift. You can fast forward through the bathroom breaks. The camera footage will BE the officers testimony in every case. If it's not on film, it happened however the victim (sorry, suspect) says it did.
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Make the recording ubiquitous
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Once on the camera shouldn't be turned off by anything other than police headquarters remotely turning it off.
Then require that an external board for oversite of the system.
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Re: Re:
By just triggering the recording you don't have to constantly be uploading content and congesting the bandwidth with needless info. But there is the trade-off you might miss something important because a recording wasn't triggered in time.
Course the NSA in a gesture of good will could turn over the use of their Utah site for storing and indexing the videos.
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However, as long as the public is kept out of the loop, this whole concept is pointless and ineffective.
ALL POLICE records should be public property. When the Police own such records, they no longer work for the public and have become a force unto themselves answering to an unknown authority.
And as far as I can tell, that situation already exists.
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LAPD officers will no longer be using the Tasers they are issued for subduing suspected law-breakers.
On the other hand, use of batons, guns and fists will rise exponentially, as these methods of law enforcement do not yet carry automatic recording technology.
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Re: Re:
That's why I started the post with:
"Good news for the Los Angeles public then."
Bad news is of course that now the cops will instead, be "forced" to use the older methods of punishment... er, enforcement.
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How about making it work the other way?
(Wouldn't want to 'accidentally' leave the camera in the car. In a plastic bag. With a sign saying: Danger! Biohazard!)
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waste of money
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Still not solving the problem.
That means the footage, whether or not triggered by a taser, will only be available if it serves towards conviction of the suspect.
And footage that shows police wrongdoing gets systematically "lost".
The police have nothing to fear from bodycams any more than they have to fear dashcams.
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All the video will show is the suspect being electrocuted and dropping to the ground face first. With the only context being the officer's sworn statement about what led up to the altercation. On other words, useless.
Remember when police rolled up on a 7 year old boy with a BB gun and shot him dead in 2 seconds? The only reason we know the altercation only lasted 2 seconds is thanks to the park's security cameras. If the officer's camera only started rolling once the trigger was pulled. It would be easy for him to say he tried to talk the boy down. Which we know didn't happen, thanks to the 3rd party camera system in the park.
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