Lefty Lawyers do 180 on police body cams

I'm against them because it's evidence that can be used against you, but there's no telling what will happen if a body cam can just stop working.

Remember, a cop's job is to arrest you and send you to prison. Their job isn't to give you evidence that can't be used against you in a court of law, but to provide evidence that can. Great if you're guilty, but not so great if you're innocent.

What was the reason for cops wearing body cams again?

 

These fools got what they asked for, now they hate it because there are simply more criminal arrests and convictions.

 

The issue at hand is use of the camera in the SOP...That is not a left or right political issue..

 

I support body cameras. It is better for both sides, but they should not be allowed to turn them off. When they become prolific enough, juries will not want to convict without them, just like DNA evidence has transformed murder trials. Juries want to see it there. It has become a de facto minimum requirement for a great many juries.

 

In general the right to privacy of the general public matters more than the privacy of police officers as they are in a position of power and we need to make sure they are not abusing this power. I am disturbed by the governments increasing encroachment on the privacy of citizens and the constitution tried to ban stuff like this by not allowing warantless searches. The government got around this by not technically going into homes to monitor and to monitor from street cams and the internet. However this monitoring has its benefits and allows criminals to be caught.

Body cams do encourage more responsible policing and easier resolution of police brutality claims and I don't think the lawyer was against exonerating them of these claims and addressing these claims is what these cams are about. The trouble is they can be used to encroach on the privacy of private citizens. Personally I feel that they can help provide evidence of a crime scene and can be used to prove someone said something or had something the officer didn't notice.

 

Thinking which evaporates with each frame of footage.

 

I hadn't even considered that body cams would be incorporating facial recognition software, but I can now understand that it's a logical conclusion because all traffic cams do operate with licence plate recognition software. Soon all of society will be treated like software viruses, so much for privacy. Even walking around with a cell phone in your pockets these days is like walking around with an NSA tracking device with a bug and a camera on you. That's why I leave mine in the other room during sex. I'm not bashful but I'm also not an exhibitionist.

 

If you're going to push for something, don't you think it would be a good idea to think it through some? Why is it surprising that if cops are forced to wear body cameras, that they'd find ways of actually using the pictures to help them do their job? Ah, the unpleasantness of the unintended consequence rears its ugly head once again...

Tear ducts? That's not what first came to my mind about what they were thinking with...

We want to show Y by doing X. But doing X doesn't necessarily show Y, and oh by the way, it can be used to show Z, which is not what the "show me more Y" crowd wants at all. But too bad. It shows what it shows, what it shows can be used in a variety of ways, and while you can require the use of a tool, you can't necessarily control what use of the tool brings you.

Now that's a bold and innovative idea. Wouldn't that be helpful?

What I find most disturbing is that the lefties who pushed so hard for these cameras to be worn couldn't see this result coming from a mile away.

 

That would be great if we actually focused on "all" criminals (government employed included).

 

I don't trust anybody with that kind of information. I don't want the arms of our government to have almost limitless power. I think that the body cams should only be used for facial recognition for people actually involved in an incident with the police officer, unless the police get a warrant looking for a specific thing. Our founders were very wise to limit the government. We should be that wise as well.

 

So do you think that facial recognition software should be run on all video from bodycams?

 

I don't. I don't like any surveillance recognition software including license plate recognition, because it captures and violate the privacy of everyone and anyone without cause or legal warrant. It's a violation of the 5th amendment.

 

OP's "article" completely ignores the main complaints that the program gives the officers too much control over when the camera is recording meaning that the preceding events leading up to an arrest are skipped defeating the purpose of the bodycam. The officers can then turn the cam back on after violence starts and use that as "evidence" that the citizen being arrested resorted to violence even if the officer was the once that escalated the situation.

 

Body cams usually show the police acted appropriately and the minority behaved irrationally. So it's best to shut down the use of cameras and rely on the testimony of minority "witnesses" who weren't actually present at the time of the incident.

 

He had a book officer, I swear.

 

Besides being hopelessly naive, your post doesn't really address the topic at hand.

 

I see no realistic reason that it cannot legally be done, at least on footage from public places. I think people overestimate the ability of mass surveillance to be effectively sorted though to where they will be amassing files on everybody, and I doubt that local police departments are going to want to pay someone to sit there and do this for every face in every frame captured. It could be useful when police roll up on a mob scene and people are scattering.

 

The process could be automated with a computer program

 

That would be extremely effective. Imagine a cop being able to identify any felons as she/he passed them on the street. That would be great. The jails will be full, though!

 

Remember that any new power that you give to Andy Taylor, you are also giving to the cop from Training Day.

 

It is not a power. It is a device. If a cop personally had that kind of photographic memory, we would think that person to be a terrific addition to the force.

 

Body cams protect civilians from corrupt police violence and protect good cops from false accusations of violence. This far outweighs the issues with privacy.

If I'm stopped by an officer in the middle of the night on a dark road both myself and the officer (if he's a good cop) will want the camera recording.

 

Agreed. I have no fondness for cops. I was in a bad situation with a lying cop when I was in college. And my brother was beaten up by the cops in Daytona Beach, FL because he was publicly drunk on Spring Break (the horror!). But I hate thugs 1,000x more.

Anything we can do to shine a light on bad behavior is a good thing.

 

You can't run a photographic memory through facial recognition software. As I said before, the camera itself isn't the problem, it's what you do with the footage.

 

And if you were a government criminal caught on body cam you would be caught.