Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

IANAL and I have no idea about the "rules of evidence" in the US, and only slightly more about UK rules but IIRC in the UK all evidence gathered by the police in any given investigation has to be supplied to the defence whether that evidence is used in Court or not, and that would by definition include anything garnered from BWCs.

I think the legal profession would smell a rat long before anything came to Court if material potentially helpful to a defendant (or a complainant in the case of a complaint against the police) was mysteriously missing because of an unexplained defect in a BWC.

Evidence - tampering is hardly unknown (sadly) but tampering with video evidence might be very hard to conceal, even by simply denying its availability. (What? Both (all?) BWCs used during this arrest were faulty?) It would not be long before defence barristers were asking about serial numbers of BWCs used against their clients, along with the test / maintenance records on them. And insisting on questioning the person(s) responsible for doing the downloads and storing the material.

I would suggest that "faulty BWCs" could very easily rebound hard on anyone (or any organisation) trying that approach.

Broken?

BWCs will only have a chance of making a difference if every officer wears two independent cameras, which must be recording at all times that they are on duty, with failure to record being a disciplinary offence and multiple failures resulting in dismissal.

The reason is obvious

Even when body cameras have shown cops at fault they often face no consequences. Why should cops alter their bad behavior if all their going to get is "administrative leave" (i.e. paid vacation) and then be absolved of guilt because "he feared for his life", i.e. "he couldn't have known the guy wasn't going for a gun when he told him to produce identification and then shot him when he put his hand in his pocket".

In many of these cases the affected party will win millions in damages. The cop doesn't pay, the police union doesn't pay. The citizens pay, since the city pays the judgements. Cops should be required to carry liability insurance for such judgments against them for their actions. Doctors do, why shouldn't cops? They can either pay it out of their own pockets, which would be a powerful incentive to not do things that result in judgments against them, or their union can pay for it, which would be a powerful incentive for the unions to stop protecting bad cops.

Until cops face the consequences of their actions, you could have a 24x7 reality show follow them around and it wouldn't change their behavior.

or the alternative too

that all the "innocent" people being "falsely arrested" do not appear so innocent under later review. A number of claims of harassment, racism, etc. have been shut down by cameras too.

the problem being "nobody wins" as ne'er-do-wells on both sides of the badge get caught out. So of course we gotta get rid of them.

Re: Or simply

... unlike the cameras used by "activists" which always capture the unvarnished reality

Re: Or simply

Police know that if they video evidence of them doing something naughty it will be lost or they can rely on a carefully picked jury to ignore it.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the vast majority of footage on BWCs will show mundane interactions of police with the public. Despite some of the hysterical responses here, the vast majority of police are honest, hard-working (and under-paid).

There may be a public perception that they are all corrupt, and up to something, and this may be true in a tiny minority of cases, but it is hardly surprising that BWCs are not turning up evidence of widespread police misbehaviour because it is not that common.

When Police commit a crime, it gets high-profile attention, and rather than a slap-on-the-wrist, people get prison sentences. For instance: Officers in the Bijan Ebrahimi were sentenced to gaol, and in this case, they were guilty of neglectful incompetence, rather than violence themselves.

What BWCs are actually useful for is gathering evidence when the officers have to interact with someone who is a suspect, or is committing a crime. This is, after all, a fairly common scenario. The recordings can be used as evidence in court, for instance, to show what a suspect said or did, without having to rely on witness statements and cross-examinations, which cost court time and therefore money. In other words, they aren't helping the police, so much as the CPS (there is a common misunderstanding amongst the public that the police are responsible for prosecuting cases, this is fully the remit of the CPS, the police are primarily involved in preventing and detecting crime, and arresting and interviewing suspects. They will often be called to court as witnesses, but the prosecution will usually be made in the name of the Crown).

BWCs are also useful where there are allegations of excessive force by the police. There has been at least one case of a youtube video that appears to show police using excessive force when restraining someone, which conveniently omits to show the run-up to the restraint where police have approached a suspect and the suspect has become violent. The BWC in this case has shown the allegations to be false, which in turn saves the IPCC time and money that they would have to use to investigate a complaint unnecessarily. It turns out people like to accuse the police of brutality all the time...

Re: Better justice is the difference

Well exactly. That's the weird thing about this study. They have put cameras on officers and expected people to act differently around them and are surprised when people don't. People see cameras all the time, every day. They're normal. So why WOULD they change their behaviour? The assertion that cameras will make people behave differently is bunk. If the PMCs (Plod-Mounted Cams) are being sold on the basis that they will make people behave better then that's obviously not going to happen.

Surely the purpose of the camera is the recording of the officer's shift to allow them to carry out their job of law enforcement successfully? Sell the cameras on the basis of better quality evidence so that it's not Perp's Word Against Plod's.

Re: Suprised

Or you just take the suspect around the corner out of view before they accidentally fall over and die.

Re: Rational vs irrational behaviour

Unless, of course, someone particularly devious plays to the camera and exploits lack of context to get off or get the cop in trouble. Every coin I know has two sides.

Re: Rational vs irrational behaviour

Thank you for a note of reason.

Policing is hard. Most mistakes are honest ones. Sure there will be exceptions, and they'll get all the attention - but to mistake the exceptions for the rule is one of the basic fallacies.

...unless the equipment can be easily nullified (which it probably can) in which case turn it off when convenient and carry on like normal.

Which in turn would prompt the question in Court... Would you please explain to the Court why the time code on your footage is not continuous? And why does it not cover the entirety of your presence at this incident?

I have done a bit of delving in the last few minutes and a timecode (real time as well!) seems to be mandatory. One manufacturer's website has a demo playback with the timecode down to "minutes", but it didn't take long to spot that fact that the material had been edited because the timecode was discontinuous. Another model from the same maker had timecode down to seconds and that was unbroken.

Tampering with BWC video evidence might be harder than you think.

Re: Alternative Comparison

Has crime gone down since the Govts started putting CCTV all over the cities.. If not then why bother with BWCs.

Apples and Oranges I'm afraid. CCTV captures "street crime" and while it may not have resulted in any reduction in crime statistics it can make identifying a possible suspect and tracking their movements possible, not simply easier. I stress the "possible" because without the CCTV that identification and tracking might have been completely impossible previously.

A BWC, OTOH, records the interaction between a police officer and a suspect or witness, which is an entirely different scenario to what CCTV captures. If nothing else a BWC will work indoors where (public) CCTV cannot.

Having said that detection rates are dismally low, so your point about CCTV may have some validity. However conclusions about CCTV cannot be assumed to be valid for BWCs; the two have vastly different purposes.

Re: And no significant change can be expected until...

It would be nice if the perps and civilians involved had body cameras, too. Police have shown a great (and occasionally violent) aversion to that. But with higher cellphone speeds and larger storage, it might be able to store the video/audio somewhere safe from (ahem) official discretion. If a defense lawyer can present the video of a policeman ripping the suspect's bodycam off and stomping it -- that policeman's bodycam had better show a good reason for it or the case will be fatally compromised.

Re: History of Digital Telepathy

To Harry Stottle. A wonderful piece of work. Have a thousand upvotes. I had the exact same thoughts about a month or so ago, but I do not have the gumption or the talent to put them together in such a way. Thank you for articulating the concept.

My extension to the idea was to have a central AI which had access to everyone's recordings, and which could 'join the dots' between various experiences of the same situation. If judgement was requested by any of the participants in an incident or dispute, then the AI would reveal the encrypted evidence as required.

I think most people would allow recordings 24/7 because every time an injustice was resolved, the benefits would outweigh any doubts.

A twist in the tale: A Messiah figure who decides from an early age that he wants no further personal recordings. Haven't thought through the implications, yet. Of course, there will be a million EXTERNAL recordings of his actions from other citizens, which could be stitched together by the AI. Unless he lives as a recluse.

Re: And no significant change can be expected until...

To make it abundantly clear what you say:

It is not the BWC themselves that make a difference.

It's the rules of conduct – laws, procedures, assumptions of innocence, training/education etc. – surrounding them that need to change in accordance.

Re: And no significant change can be expected until...

"And that, ladies and germs, is how we might wrest control from government and start making their lives as much a misery as they've spent the last few thousand years doing to us...."

Until someone comes up with a way to produce plausible FAKE information and slips this ability into enough of the population to make the immutable untrustworthy.

Sorry, but it goes all the way back to E. E. Smith's Lensman series: Essentially "What man can create, man can RE-create." Thus he had to come up with something beyond the knowledge of all civilization to create something that couldn't be faked: the eponymous Lens.