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

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

Post by mekender »

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

Post by JustinR »

He is absolutely right. What needs to happen is 4K body cams for every officer in the country, to provide the other side of the story, and stop the rediculous allegations of police misconduct. Fight fire with fire.
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g-man
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by g-man »

JustinR wrote:What needs to happen is 4K body cams for every officer in the country, to provide the other side of the story, and stop the rediculous allegations of police misconduct.
Yep. Pretty much everything I've seen on places they're being used shows both a downturn in allegations and in actual incidents (granted, anecdotal, but it's what I've seen). Everybody mysteriously catches a nasty case of 'ackrite' when all parties know the entire thing is always on film.
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MarkD
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by MarkD »

g-man wrote:
JustinR wrote:What needs to happen is 4K body cams for every officer in the country, to provide the other side of the story, and stop the rediculous allegations of police misconduct.
Yep. Pretty much everything I've seen on places they're being used shows both a downturn in allegations and in actual incidents (granted, anecdotal, but it's what I've seen). Everybody mysteriously catches a nasty case of 'ackrite' when all parties know the entire thing is always on film.
There was a movement afoot to equip all NYC cops with body cameras, but the union complained that the cops couldn't turn them off if they wanted to. Which seems to negate the reason for having them in the first place.
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g-man
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by g-man »

As long as there's a way to shut them off when one is 10-100, there should be no complaints about them being on 100% of the rest of one's shift. Were I a beat cop I'd be damned if I wouldn't buy my own shit if they weren't funding it. It's a lot less expensive than getting cut by the dept because he said / she said.
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Aesop
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by Aesop »

Fuck him and the horse he rode to town on.

The problem isn't that officers are "afraid to get out of their car at 2AM and ask a group of guys 'What are you doing?'.
It's that they're scared shitless of getting videoed jumping out of their car at 2AM, egging a group into a confrontation, then doing a tune-up on a guy with a PR-24, and then charging him with "resisting arrest".*

I'm not afraid of violent criminals, because I can avoid those confrontations about 99.9% of the time.
But I can't avoid the cops, and any contact with a cop is a 50-50 proposition on whether he's a decent guy doing a legitimate stop, or some asshole who's fighting a drinking problem, an impending divorce, a pushy supervisor, and just wants to take his frustrations with being a mid-IQ college dropout with no other prospects in life out on the next guy he stops. Like me.

When they start living by Peel's Principles instead of serving as administrative revenue enhancement agents, and alternately thinking they're a bunch of tacced up Tackleberrys with delusions of special forces qualifications, policing won't be a problem in this country.

As it stands now, every uniformed officer should have a bodycam on and recording 100% of the time they're on duty (I don't give a damn about their potty breaks, edit them out when you release the tape) and any time the camera is off other than non-self-induced equipment malfunction, they should get suspended the first time, and fired the second time.

The shredded remnants of the 4th and 5th Amendments are butt-raped and ass-bleeding courtesy of "law enforcement" in this country.
It's long past time they had the dick shoved up their asses as well, both to see how it feels, and to rein in their assholery.

When they get the problem children in their own ranks to the levels of aberrational, rather than mainstream, give a holler, and I'll listen to their pissing and moaning with something other than gleeful amusement. They brought this on themselves, for the last 30-50 years.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
Right, Officer Friendly? :lol:

GoPro every swinging Richard on every force, and start winnowing out the crooks and douchebags with a scythe.
Then turn the rest of them lose to do their damned jobs, within legal limitations, and without the fucktard officers - and having to defend their jackholish behavior eternally - no longer hanging around everyone's necks like a millstone.


*(Favorite incident: Long about the early 1990s, C.O.P.S. elected to film embedded within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office. It worked splendidly, because L.A. crooks are just as stupid and photogenic as the ones in the rest of the country, right up until about week 4 or 5 of the season, when one of their crews filmed a stop where Deputy Hardass decided to roust some biker guy, basically for being on a motorcycle in public. And the dude being rousted reminded Deputy Hardass that he had been specifically enjoined against such no-probable-cause let's-fuck-with-Freddie expeditions, by a judge, in open court, and then pulled out the papers to prove it on camera. The deputy ceased-and-desisted, and the episode ended. Suddenly, with no further explanation, the very next show was no longer in Los Angeles, and balance of the season was filmed in BFEgypt. That was 25 years ago, and the LASO deputies still aren't 100% bodycammed. But they have a conga line of brand new cars stretching across two parking lots just east of downtown. Go figure what the problem is.)
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Kommander
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by Kommander »

The entirety of the Fullerton PD is cammed up. However they only turn them on when they are interacting with the public. I believe that this is more due to limited on board storage space than any desire to hide anything. LAPD was going to get cameras for everyone but suddenly people are balking at the price and want other companies to bid instead of piggybacking on an existing program.
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g-man
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by g-man »

LAPD had a plan to outfit 7k officers with body cams, at a cost of $10 effing MILLION. This was for cameras from TASER, which cost $3-400 a pop, and only record in 480p. Quick math: 7k officers at $400ea is $2.8M. WTF do they need the other $7.2M for? I'm pretty sure I could rig up a GoPro-based setup in my garage for under $300 which would last an entire shift, and instead of only recording for 30 seconds prior to the incident, would be on a constantly-on 4+ hour loop, meaning you'd have HOURs of footage leading up to any incident, not seconds. So at $300ea, you could outfit the entire ~10k LAPD officers with body cams for ~$3m. That's ~50-60 squad cars. Hell, if the requirement is for 480p video, I'm pretty sure I could cobble together something in the sub $100 range. WTF is so difficult about this?
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PawPaw
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by PawPaw »

g-man wrote:LAPD had a plan to outfit 7k officers with body cams, at a cost of $10 effing MILLION. This was for cameras from TASER, which cost $3-400 a pop, and only record in 480p. Quick math: 7k officers at $400ea is $2.8M. WTF do they need the other $7.2M for? I'm pretty sure I could rig up a GoPro-based setup in my garage for under $300 which would last an entire shift, and instead of only recording for 30 seconds prior to the incident, would be on a constantly-on 4+ hour loop, meaning you'd have HOURs of footage leading up to any incident, not seconds. So at $300ea, you could outfit the entire ~10k LAPD officers with body cams for ~$3m. That's ~50-60 squad cars. Hell, if the requirement is for 480p video, I'm pretty sure I could cobble together something in the sub $100 range. WTF is so difficult about this?
The problem, as I understand it right now, is two-fold. Yeah, body cams are a good idea, but cheap doesn't necessarily work out to good. We could get a Garmin cam and hang one around every officer's neck for about $200 at any Cabelas. It runs on a four-hour loop, with audio. Great set up.

However, what are you going to do about storage? Some minor incident last week that didn't seem to matter at the time, and suddenly, Internal Affairs is involved. Four-hour loop? That ain't happening. If you record it, you keep it forever. Or at least a year, until the civil liabilities have expired. Storage becomes a huge issue. When you have to keep 12 hours of footage from every officer wearing a cam, every shift for a year, that's a lot of gigabites. What I think is important may not be important to everyone, but when Mr. Rattlesnake, attorney-at-large subpoena's something, we need to have it available. What does he want? Who the hell knows? You've gotta keep everything, even potty breaks. Don't let that 32mb card get filled up, you'll need several for a 12-hour shift. Turn them in to your supervisor at the end of the day.
on the next guy he stops. Like me.
Everybody wants the police to be kind, caring, and absolutely impeccable when it comes to enforcing the law. Until it applies to them. Then, they want us to go simultaneously deaf and blind.

I operate every day with the attitude that it's okay to film me at my job. It saves me from being surprised when I am on film.

So, let's do the math for a small, hypothetical agency of 100 sworn officers. We're going to need 100 body cams, let's say at $300 apiece, so that's $30K for cameras. Then we're going to need a bunch of SD cards. Three per camera for 180 days each (because a street cop works 180 12-hour shifts per year.) We can probably get those for $10.00 apiece, and less on a contract, but we're going to need (100 officersX 180 days X 3 per shift) about 54,000 of those little cards at 10 bucks each, which comes to $540,000, plus the $30K for the cheap-ass cameras, so let's go talk to the budget director about the $570,000 to equip our officers with body cameras.

I'm not opposed to body cameras, and I'm one of those old Peelian cops that Aesop likes to evoke. But, I understand budget considerations. Our agency recently bought a bunch of cams and are trying to learn to live with them, but I understand that data storage is a monumental headache, especially when you're dealing with "The Cloud" and service contracts and etc, etc. It's not nearly as inexpensive as everyone likes to think it is.
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BobbyK
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Re: F.B.I. Director Says ‘Viral Video Effect’ Blunts Police Work

Post by BobbyK »

Storage. Storage at that kind of massive scale is pretty fucking expensive.

That said, if *I* were architecting a solution for this, it'd be spec'd for 24 hours of storage on the camera, cryptographic signing of the video so we can validate that it hasn't been fucked with, and automatic sync to a hardened storage device integrated to the patrol car, which in turn would sync to centralized storage at the station/depot/whatever.
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