Use of force DROPS DRAMATICALLY when police forced to wear cameras.

Blame police brutality to tactical officer Lt Worf!

For a very strong Klingon who can easily restrain people, he loves to stun people with the phaser! Mind conditioning, hello!

Originally posted by yourmaker

Originally posted by votan
More cameras.. just what we need.

Right? I was just thinking of the implications of such. Where does it end?

Next thing you know the cops are lobbying for dashcams in every car for the same effect to slow everyone down etc.. then we find out they're hacking them and on and on it goes.

Many businesses already have employees on camera so the police would be no different from them. Police are citizens as well and not all are bad so we should protect their freedoms as well but no one should have reasonable expectations of privacy while on the job. Privacy is not black and white and if the citizens can not reduce govt then we should at least monitor the heck out of it and increase the oversight. This is a win win really because now the police can also have evidence to show when someone falsely accuses them of mistreatment to get out of trouble. This one swings both ways.

Originally posted by FortAnthem

No wonder they hate when we film them; they can't get away with kicking our teeth in for no good reason anymore and get away with it.

A police department recently bought some officer mounted cameras and decided to perform an experiment. They only had half the shift wear the cameras at any time to see how the officers would behave with and without the surveillance. The cops with the cameras had a dramatic decrease in use of force while those wihout were found to be TWICE as likely to use force in the course of their duties.

Rialto, CA Police Made to Wear Cameras, Use of Force Drops by Over Two-Thirds

When cops in a Rialto, California were forced to wear cameras, their use of force dropped by over two-thirds. Additionally, the officers who were not made to wear the cameras used force twice as much as those who did. This strongly suggests the majority of the time police use force is unnecessary. In other words, the majority of the time these officers used force they were simply committing acts of violence which they don't feel comfortable committing if it's captured on film.

A convenient feature of the camera is its "pre-event video buffer," which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto's police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often -- in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren't wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

Informationliberation

I'm sure that even the officers who weren't wearing the cameras watched what they did because they never knew if their backup might be wearing one. Like they always remind us "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have no reason to complain".

Seems the cops in this department, at least, fear that they might get caught doing something wrong while wearing the cameras and cleaned up their act. If only we could make these mandatory for all departments, maybe we could get some accountability in law enforcement.

Nothing like the fear of getting caught to get a dirty cop to clean up his act.

edit on 8/15/13 by FortAnthem because:

___________ extra DIV

reply to post by FortAnthem


A side question I would wonder about is did the incidents of Officers being hurt increase for those wearing the cameras. That might give a clue as to whether they were hesitating wrongly or just being a good fellow citizen helping their community as one who protects and serves?

Honestly, how about taking the cameras away from everywhere? Cops don't need them to spy on us, and we don't need them to spy on them. What is this...Russia??

Society has become too intrusive into others lives.

Yeah, no different than the show COPS...

Thats good, logical, but it wont serve public for long time. That cameras wont be public, and when police get this as normal thing, they will continue to do things they are trained for - power abuse simply because system wants them to do that.

reply to post by elouina


But then you would have to watch Obama and Reggie Love....cough cough...
Doing their thing in the Oral Office.

I'm not surprised by this, I installed cctv at home last year and the scumbag minority stopped the agro immediately, they only act up if they think they can get away with it.

Being that the cops are monitoring our every move,

Only seems fair that they should return the favor.

Put it on the web, sell the content, and get rid of taxes.

So... if you tell 'the people,' "you're going to be spied on everywhere" they go, "No! We hate that!"

If you tell the people, "Only all the people you worry about or don't like are going to be spied on" they go, "OK! That's good!"

Then you just expand the definition of who 'needs' to be spied on.

And eventually glasses-cams are far too limited. Corner cams are far too limited. Since our satellites can read gum wrappers in the gutter AND recognize faces AND recognize voices, it makes far more sense to expand the use of those as well, along with an improvement in thermal and many other alternate-frequency imaging.

Following this to its logical conclusion, using a few current ATS threads:

Homeless people and all areas with them need to be spied on. They commit crimes, and criminals hide among them.

Businesses and their people need to be spied on. They discriminate unfairly if they are not monitored.

Schools definitely need to be spied on. Bad people sneak in, 12 year olds deal drugs, teachers get hot with the teens, it's all for the good of the children man.

Colleges need to be spied on. Rape is out of this world. (Politically incorrect news headline: surveillance team brawl in fight for assignment to the college monitors...)

All political offices need to be spied on. That doesn't require examples.

All military areas need to be spied on. Especially since people keep shooting journalists and hazing gays during boot.

I could go on, and on, and on.

It starts with the police in part because the very people who would most resist "overt surveillance" are so quickly happy to impose it upon others. We just totally wiped out the primary resistance to surveillance!

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I grew up around a lot of LEO's. I studied criminal justice in part of college and interacted with many related to that, and I've certainly been pulled over enough times. In all of that, I met two cops who were unreasonably cranky in my opinion; another one was truly a bonehead, and all of the rest of them seemed like pretty decent people. Some I knew well and they were definitely decent people, with a horrible freakin job. One was my next door neighbor (a homicide detective) and his son my crush boy next door (who is now a LEO).

The ratio of good to bad is so high in my experience that I am always just mind-boggled at people acting like all cops are spawns of satan on an orwellian violence trip. I am not saying anyone is wrong. I just think it is so amazing that my exposure to this general group of people is so radically different than most peoples' that I can't figure it out. Is it where I grew up? Is it that I have only once (and met no LEO's there) lived in a truly "big city?" Is it that I genuinely appreciate them as humans doing hard dangerous work and am not defensive and am very polite, not so much to suck up as because I think they just don't need my crap on top of everything else in their day and if I screwed up, I shouldn't be mad at them for stopping me etc., I should be mad at myself for making it necessary? Is it the position of the stars? Where did my mysterious collection of nice cops who are helpful with directions and good to children come from? Where do the apparently endless gigantic collection of jerk cops who are irrational violent bullies come from?

Is the problem that in our push to lower standards so sufficient women (history: LAPD) and others get in 'equally enough' we have lowered standards to the degree that the least common denominator is now dominating the job?

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Back on topic: I read a story about a man the police suspected murdered his daughter, a young woman. There wasn't any serious evidence for this and he was horribly traumatized by her death. They had him in interrogation for eons, like a military bright light shouting sleep deprivation rote "walking him through imagining the brutal way he killed her" type, until the man was so hypnotized, delirious he didn't know what the hell was going on, and he ended up crying that he had no idea, he was so confused now, and (now that they'd forced him to visualize having done this like 200 times while profoundly sleep deprived) maybe he HAD done it, he couldn't remember... it ended up with him signing a confession. The judge/jury was shown a film of the interrogation and were so horrified they threw out the confession. You would think that this would have been a small moment of enlightenment... the PD pulled filming of interrogations from then on, having learned their lesson.

If all my calls with the phone company are "monitored for quality assurance" how come we can't monitor police for QA? I agree it's a great idea -- and for their safety as well, definitely. Except --

Except everything is PRECEDENT.

Orwellion surveillance is bad. Even in situations when the reasoning is good.

It's them today, it's you tomorrow.