F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

[MarkD]

Pawpaw:
While I have little doubt you do your best to be honorable in how you go about your job, I've seen enough examples of cops who aren't so encumbered. Here in the Eastern Megalopolis (as Jeff Cooper called it) the attitude seems to be "I'll arrest you, then figure out why." I had a buddy hassled at a bag search in the subway because he had a two inch Swiss Army knife, he had to provide a reason why he had it (he used it at work for cutting open boxes), and had to give the cop his business card to prove he worked in a place where opening boxes was part of the job description.

Yet another reason to not live in the "Eastern Megalopolis".

So sell off a couple of those military style armored vehicles to collectors (or scrap dealers) and use the proceeds to buy cameras and memory.

I don't own any armored vehicles. I don't believe my agency does, either.

As far as the storage requirements, there are ways around that. The video doesn't need to be HD quality, or even in color. The quality that comes from security cameras, with audio, would work just fine.

That's certainly true, which brings us back to your buddy in the Megalopolis. I'm surprised that the subway didn't have cameras that would have caught the exchange you reference. If what you say is true, there should have been plenty of video evidence to help your buddy recover his property. In these latitudes, we wouldn't dream of confiscating a pocket knife. They're common, everyday apparel. For that matter, we don't ask about guns in cars,either. We simply assume that everyone has a gun (or two) in the car. That's not an issue either.

Why might someone think that just because a friend had a bad experience once-upon-a-time at a faraway place, that somehow it reflects on how I do my job?

I suspect for the most part that departments like yours aren't causing too many problems. The departments in NYC, L.A., Chicago on the other hand.... Those are the places where the cops need to be cameraed up. There's a different mentality that I see with you and with the cops I've known in this area. Your attitude seems to be "You can have it (whatever it is, pocketknife, gun, 48 oz soda) unless you've given us a compelling reason why you shouldn't be permitted to have it." The NYC attitude is "You can't have it unless you can prove to our satisfaction that there's a compelling reason for you to have it."

My buddy didn't get his knife confiscated because he could prove to the cop he had a legitimate reason to have it. As if one NEEDS a legitimate reason to carry a pocket knife. But had it been confiscated he wouldn't have had a leg to stand on, and it would have gone down as another deadly weapon removed from the street by the NYPD. And he'd have been lucky to avoid being arrested, especially if the cop could snap the knife open by holding the blade and flicking it, thus making it the legal equivalent of a switchblade (albeit still one with a two-inch blade, the horror!). So thousands in legal/defense attorney bills over a pen knife.

There are enough cameras in NYC, including in the subway, to make George Orwell blush.

My quip about the military armored car was also for the bigger departments. NYPD a couple of those tracked APCs. What an urban police department needs with tracked vehicles is beyond me, but....

But yeah, someday I plan to move to America.

[Aesop]

Why might someone think that just because a friend had a bad experience once-upon-a-time at a faraway place, that somehow it reflects on how I do my job?

You're not the problem. A million of your blue-suited brethren are.

I stopped to help out at an accident, mere moments after it had occurred, in the middle of L.A. suburbs. I was coming home from volunteering at a Red Cross gig, and wearing a 2-foot Red Cross across my back. Our uniforms were almost identical to the city's medical guys minus badges or turnouts, and plus Red Cross patches, with full city of L.A. blessing. The two LAFD paramedics were doing CPR on one of the four victims. One officer was busy wrangling lookie-loos when I stepped around the gaggle of no-loads to help the overwhelmed pair of fire guys. As soon as an engine company showed up to reinforce their efforts, I handed off what I was doing, said my goodbyes, and started to walk away.

Whereupon Officer RespectMyAuthoritay stopped me, offered to charge me with interfering, and demanded to search my entire first aid bag for contraband, because gun/badge/rampant infallibility. When that didn't work, because I had nothing in it you couldn't buy at the corner drug store, he proceeded to question me about my qualifications. So I handed him my shiny new L.A. County EMT card, and explained that I was also a nursing student at the local JC.

He then proceeded to assure me that the local JC I was studying nursing at, had no such nursing program, and I was therefore lying to him, another offense he offered to charge me with.

I calmly told him that his perspicacious observation would clearly come as a shock to my dozen or so nursing professors, but that I would be sure and pass it on to them on his behalf.
I then clarified that he was, in fact, giving me a ration of shit for being the sole bystander to assist the fire department at the scene of an accident, whereupon he then specifically threatened that if he ever saw me (in my home neighborhood, mind) near the scene of any accident again, he would arrest me on the spot for obstruction of justice. During this last, the fire captain and lead paramedic stopped by me amidst loading their worst patient into an ambulance, and said "Thank you!" to me for helping them out at the beginning of the incident.

That really frosted Officer Asshole's cupcakes, and I seized the opportunity to ask permission to withdraw, which he reluctantly granted. (I got the feeling he was itching to write me a jaywalking ticket as well.) I reported the above in person to a desk sgt. some minutes later, and got the expected brush-off and complete lack of interest. This all took place a couple of months before Rodney King, BTW. Karma is a bitch with a strap-on, sometimes. Every bit of shit LAPD got and gets, they deserve, in spades, pretty much from now until hell freezes over.

That was 20-something years ago, and that, in a nutshell, is precisely why most law enforcement runs scared shitless at the idea of the public watching what they do 24/7/365. Most (more than half would be my guess) of them would have their salaries cut in half, and a not inconsequential number fired for cause, within weeks. Due to the reluctance of DAs to prosecute, firing for cause from the PD should come with 30 days' service in stripes on a chain gang as a condition of the award, in lieu of a prison sentence.

I don't expect officers to be deaf and blind if I'm the object of the exercise. I do expect them not to be gobsmackingly stupid mouthbreathers. (That may be unfair, as most departments select specifically and purposely for below-average intelligence, though occasionally sharp folks do squirt through the filter.)

Regardless, I don't expect officers to do anything but their job, with common sense, and within policy where the latter two don't crash into each other. I've never argued a speeding ticket in my life; I earned every one of them fair and square. But the badge-heavy jackassical attitude about 95% of officers strap on with their gunbelts and deploy far too frequently make we wish that we'd cut their number to 5% of their current legions, summoned only upon a miscreant's body, dead or alive, and the citizenry restored to enforcing most law themselves, within the limits of the local codes, and fully and legally armed.
Alternatively, 50-75% of any police force should be civilian reservists, doing an annual two weeks in the community, and returning to it the other 50 weeks a year, minus any special privilege.

Either option would be a safer community, and a happier society.

As for the software/hardware issues, I posit the following suggestion: what say we GoPro every sworn and badged mofo out there first, and work the kinks out once they're all under the microscope? I think we'd find that most footage unrelated to prosecution could be purged after 6 months, and that having a 100% citizens review board selected at random, and randomly auditing the shifts of all available officers annually would solve most other problems. The rest would be taken care of by supervisors reviewing specific incidents and problem officers, and offering the corrective guidance they're paid to do, except now with some means of seeing the problem firsthand, and perhaps stepping in before it becomes ingrained.
Or pro-actively purging the unsalvageable before they make the news.

We already know that everything we say may be recorded and used against us in a court of law.
There can therefore be no argument worth the breath to whine it out nor the time to hear it that avails against the observation that turnabout is fair play.

[Langenator]

Probably with a plugin unit for handling the upload that can be kept wherever your "office" is, or integrated with the charging station to handle it after end of shift.

I smell a product coming along.

Keep the price under $300.00, and you'll sell a metric butt-ton of them.

No idea how much they cost, but Newport News PD already have them. It's not constant record, just public interactions. Then plug it in at the end of shift and it downloads while it charges.

[PawPaw]

Back in the day, when dash-cams were evolving, a local agency got a bunch of them. Little camera on the dash, big storage unit in the trunk. They recorded on a loop, but whenever the officer turned on his overhead light bar, the machine saved that portion of the tape from one minute before the lightbar came on until the end of the traffic stop. That first minute before the lightbar comes on is really important to capture an offense, but the cops using the cameras had to learn to clean up their language. For example:

One fine morning, a good officer was patrolling in his zone when he noticed a motorist commit a rather dangerous (and illegal) maneuver, passing a parked and lit school bus. The officer reached down to the console, tripped the overhead lights, and muttered "Look at this silly motherfucker" under his breath. He initiated the traffic stop, issued the citation, and went on his way.

Two months later, in court, the tape was played for the judge. In the video, we can clearly see the motorist pass the lit-up school bus, loading kids for the trip to school. We could also hear the officer mutter under his breath, "Look at that silly motherfucker."

The defense attorney harped on that for about 20 minutes, Accused the officer of all manner of bad intentions. The cross-examination was brutal. The judge, finally, found that the motorist had indeed committed a violation of the motor code and assessed an appropriate fine. The agency sent out a policy memo, specifically forbidding all offers to refer to anyone as a "silly motherfucker." Needless to say, that memo caused a bit of mirth when it was read at roll-call every shift for the next week.

Cameras work both ways, they record the good and the bad. That's why I've never been afraid of them.

[Rumpshot]

I worked in Air Traffic Control for 42 years. Every moment I was on duty was recorded, on audio tape of one type or another, and archived for a period of time.

Working out the details for recording and archiving video should not be a big deal. Making that archive reasonably secure and not edited can be a challenge. I have made recordings of accidents and incidents as legal documents and the steps to make it so are a pain in the butt. We had to copy from 5 minutes before until 5 minutes after the entire incident. The copies and the original tapes were then kept for TWO years after any and all legal proceedings were complete.

The current state of the art capabilities are already there. How to implement them is the issue. Then setting standards for archiving and storage.

GoPro for example will readily transfer, in real time, images via bluetooth to another device such as a tablet.

It is all details.

[blackeagle603]

This stuff will be streaming realtime by wireless onto some type of cloud storage before you know it.

Remind me to look at harddrive stocks again...

[D5CAV]

Agree with Aesop.

That's twice in one month.

Must be a sign of the Apocalypse.

[mekender]

I worked in Air Traffic Control for 42 years. Every moment I was on duty was recorded, on audio tape of one type or another, and archived for a period of time.

Working out the details for recording and archiving video should not be a big deal. Making that archive reasonably secure and not edited can be a challenge. I have made recordings of accidents and incidents as legal documents and the steps to make it so are a pain in the butt. We had to copy from 5 minutes before until 5 minutes after the entire incident. The copies and the original tapes were then kept for TWO years after any and all legal proceedings were complete.

The current state of the art capabilities are already there. How to implement them is the issue. Then setting standards for archiving and storage.

GoPro for example will readily transfer, in real time, images via bluetooth to another device such as a tablet.

It is all details.

I have worked in a couple of dozen different call center type jobs over the last couple of decades, every single word I said on every call was recorded and I knew about it... Every note I typed in every order entry system or database is also recorded. In some places, every inch of floor space outside of bathrooms was on video...

[Precision]

Aesop for President.

Draft him. If he won't serve, force him. It's not like it will make him any more surly.

As an aside, I don't automatically defer to blue clad authority figures. That goes a long way towards getting extra scrutiny. Like Aesop, I assume I have a goodly chance of needing to have the interaction recorded for MY SAFETY. I would say in metro areas I have had the threat of a jack boot roughly 30% of the time. In non-metro areas, roughly 10%. Not good, but non-metro is below the standard asshole threshold in every profession. Metro, not so much.

[Netpackrat]

Aesop for President.

Draft him. If he won't serve, force him. It's not like it will make him any more surly.

Yeah, but nuclear weapons....