At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.
In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.
Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.
ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.
Well you didn’t do something silly like give control over the means of monitoring the police to only the police right? . . . right?
You bring up a fair point. This should be investigated. In the interest of fairness let the investigation be handled by the police.
They’ve investigated themselves and found that everything they’re doing is completely acceptable. Carry on citizen.
we get it. cops are cowards. why else would this be one of the only countries where officers are lethally armed around the clock. cowards.
cops should be tested for steroid use randomly and monthly.
My guess as long as 320 million people have 434 million legal firearms the cops are not going to give theirs up either.
why else would this be one of the only countries where officers are lethally armed around the clock
Because it’s also the only country where many citizens are lethally armed around the clock I’d guess
If you stop a random person in traffic in Europe for routine control then it’s extremely unlikely that they have a gun in their car and even less likely that they will pull it on you.
If you are permanently having to think about scenarios where random people pull a gun on you because it’s not a very unlikely situation to happen then it’s not unreasonable to expect certain paranoia to start to form…
While the stats for “people killed by police” are always shown around I’d guess that the “police killed by citizens” also is much higher in the US.
Gun control is the only solution that even has a chance to remove this spiralling violence of trigger happy cops imho
Google tells me that less than 2% of Americans carry a gun.
I’d guess a police officer is seeing more than 50 random people a day though which makes it a daily occurrence to be in contact with people carrying which actually strengthens my point
You’d think at some point they’d adapt to the stress of such a situation (especially since they literally signed up for it, and ostensibly trained for it), so that they can handle it effectively without murdering others, though…
Soldiers fighting wars in hostile countries are (in theory) held to higher standards in this way.
A cashier at Taco Bell sees more than that.
…most of the footage is kept from public view
Well yeah, unedited video footage has this odd tendency to exonerate the innocent and impugn the guilty
Hear me out on this, but I don’t think the public should be seeing most body cam footage. I don’t think anyone should be seeing most bodycam footage, including the officer that shot the video and their department.
When I inform a cop of a crime, I don’t particularly want that conversation released to the general public. While I don’t technically have “privacy” while providing such a tip, I don’t think it unreasonable that my identity and information should be held in fairly strict confidence.
Body cam footage isn’t supposed to be released under public records requests. Metadata indicating that footage was shot at a particular time and place should be released, but the footage itself should only be accessible with a subpoena. Not even the cop who shot it should have access to that footage without a subpoena. That footage should go into a black hole, and only be pulled out with judicial oversight. Only the metadata should be widely available, to inform potential complainants of what video they can subpoena.
The video should be easily accessible to complainants, plaintiffs, or defendants through subpoena, but that’s about it.
At the same time, I think a body camera should serve as an officer’s time clock. They should only be paid while their camera is turned on, and they should not be entitled to any privileges, powers, or protections afforded to law enforcement officers (especially including qualified immunity) while scheduled to work, but not on camera.
Absolutely not. That defeats the entire purpose. Foia requests should 100% be answered.
An officer wears a body camera. A confidential informant against the mafia runs up to him in the street and starts talking to him.
A mafia lawyer files a FOIA request for the body camera video of every officer in the department.
Should the department comply with this FOIA request, give up the video and expose the informant to the mafia?
Should the officer be allowed to leave his camera off throughout the day, so as to avoid creating a record that he would be forced to turn over?
Suppose I were to SWAT you. I spoof your number, call the police, tell them I’m you, get them to raid “my” house. They get all geared up, turn in their cameras, raid your house, discover it was a prank. Should I, or anyone I tell, now be allowed to file a FOIA request for their video footage, and publish it “for the lulz”?
The idealistic, absolute position you took here would be ripe for abuse.
I want those cameras running all day long. They should be incorporated into the officer’s badge, and have no “off” setting. It should be recording from the time they take it off the charger at the start of their shift, and should keep running until they put it back on the charger after their shift.
The only way that level of intrusiveness is feasible is if nobody - and I mean nobody - can view that video without a warrant or a subpoena.
Obviously that’s not an artist situation. Easy appendage to the law. Arrests can’t be done with cameras off and turning a camera off should automatically be logged. Therefore a cup who presses the button to turn one off before an arrest should be subject to firing and prosecution. Pressing the button before a your convo with an informant should be no big deal.
Welcome to nuance. It’s where we don’t blanket accept manipulation and bullying just to avoid a particular specific scenario included in the blanket.
Also yeah, why shouldn’t a SWAT be recorded and subject to request?
We also can’t rule out technical failure. That’s why they should be tamper resistant and have a log for button presses, GPS data, and automatically report. I don’t wanna see a cop be prosecuted because some tech fucked up on them.
Also yeah, why shouldn’t a SWAT be recorded and subject to request?
You failed to comprehend that situation. You do not appear to understand the concept of “swatting” if you believe it even remotely reasonable to release that camera footage.
Humans are notoriously bad at consistently following requirements. If your system requires extensive human interaction in real time, your system will also require tolerance for mistakes that humans consistently make when given only split seconds to consider their decisions. The exemplar scenarios I presented demand significantly more thought and consideration than a single officer’s quick decision as to whether or not to record. Cases should not succeed or fail, and confidence should not be kept or broken on a single officer’s split second decision as to whether his camera should be on or off at a particular moment.
With your system, cameras will occasionally be off when they should be on. That’s just human fallibility. No amount of punishment will ever prevent an honest mistake.
We can’t get footage if it was never recorded, so we should err on the side of creating the recording. But, we cannot allow the existence of a recording to create unnecessary harm, either to the officer or to members of the public.
We don’t need to see any video where there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. When there is a suspicion, we need that camera to have been on. My approach systematically solves both problems; your approach does not.
I had to file a report to an officer against a family member. Definitely would suck if that went public for some reason.
The problem there is that neither political party can reconcile this untrustworthiness of police with in their party line.
I think to some degree this is tripped up by the parties positions on guns: Republican party messaging is pro-cop, but cannot trust police so much that it undermines the pro-gun position that you cannot actually trust police to be the only ones capable of protecting you. Conversely Democrat party’s messaging sort of distrusts police, but cannot openly distrust them to a degree that reconciles with actually NOT trusting them to be your only line of defense as it undermines this core political position that it is wrong for citizens to have the means for armed self-defense.
I disagree. Both parties want the objective viewpoint that cameras provide. Democrats primarily out of distrust of cops; Republicans out of distrust of the general public.
Cops generally want cameras, but don’t want to be subjected to micromanaging and administrative abuse.
Finally someone with a reasonable response. The other day I saw a very mentally ill woman attempt to stab a police officer and had to be shot.
I would never want myself, family member or loved one to be seen like that.
Same with drug overdoses or a number of other emergencies.
Your feelings matter dramatically less than society’s ability to keep police in line. If you wanna close your eyes, go ahead. Don’t close mine.
This is a point I’m making because many feel this way about close loved ones, and not wanting tons of strangers and weirdos watching. Basic dignity for the deceased. That being said this information shouldn’t be completely restricted and be accessible via the American freedom of information act.
All of this extremely personal footage shouldn’t be dumped to the public for everyone to see, only accessible when suspected of suspicious activity or other officer/authority misconduct, with the freedom of information act mentioned precisely.
There’s nothing personal or even reasonable expectation of privacy about what you described. Deal with some embarrassment. Truth and accountability matters more.
Abolish police.
There’s no “reforming” a system that was BUILT this way.
I don’t want to hear it. Find another place to lick boots.
The system in the USA is built this way. There are countries in the world where police officers act professionally and can be trusted.
We don’t want a lawless, free for all place without any law enforcement, we deserve a proper force, trained to behave in a professional manner, and monitored to do so.
You could describe the deep reform needed as “abolish and then build from the ground”, but that’s a matter of how to reach the goal, rather than a change in the goal itself’.
We could start by making the people who are issued government firearms and the ability to stop whoever they want conform to higher standards than random schmucks in the population. We don’t need lower standards when lives and livelihoods are on the line.
Gee I wonder who is out there that will recklessly give excess power to sketchy characters as long as they believe that person will only hurt the “other” people.
The watering down of “Defund the Police” for more palatable public consumption was a travesty.
“Oh no, we’re reasonable! We just want the police to have access to more training and better tools to engage with the public!”
No, we wanted them gone, from the ground up.
It definitely showed just how powerful and overwhelming copaganda is. “Defund the Police” really struck a nerve with the people who hold the power in US society, I think we should keep striking that nerve.
Here the police are viewed as the proverbial ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Every dollar spent on them is evidence of a failure somewhere else in the system.
We still don’t want to remove them though, they still provide that important safety net; any complex system is likely to have errors at some point.
You say it’s boot licking to question you, which in itself is fucking retarded.
But I want to hear your plan.
Say we abolish the police - what next?
There is no such thing as reforming the Police. They are an evil collective of people.
I disagree. Just saw a video on krudplug of a cop shooting a guy right before he can cut up a lady with a butcher knife.
There are crazy, dangerous people in the world. If you can’t fight and you don’t own a gun, you are at the mercy of others to protect you.
I think it’s sad how the vast majority of people who are anti-cop cannot fight and do not own guns. Did they see what happened in CHAZ?
The reasoning you just used was in the form of an anecdote, which undermines your whole point. Anecdotal thinking is one of the most common ways that humans arrive at irrational conclusions.
Why should you care? Well, if you believe what you stated, then you should want other people to believe it too. In order to do this the first step is to learn how to present it without any of the common logical flaws humans are born with.
Your argument pattern is, “Event X happened and I saw it, therefore Y”. No. You need a much larger sample size to make a point. I can’t teach you rational argument in one post, but hopefully you’ll become curious enough to learn. Have a nice day.
Yet most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes. And of course now we have the Internet so now there’s availability bias of all of the extreme cases that go viral. When a study asked how many unarmed blacks were killed by police each year most left leaning were wrong by an order of magnitude.
most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes
Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.
There are some biases inherent to the relevant data. For example, you might be right about this specific situation (police shooting unarmed black people), but what about other instances of violence or misconduct?
We need to consider where data about that comes from. Are we to trust the accuracy of police reports and their own statements as they pertain to misconduct? IA investigations that frequently find no wrongdoing even when it’s plainly obvious that the situation was handled improperly? Or at least could have been avoided? Should we rely upon charges filed against police and their conviction rate?
There’s no official national database for this stuff by the way, and localities almost never produce such metrics willingly, so it’s up to someone to comb through public records. And that, like the case of body cam videos, assumes that police will properly follow FOIA requests.
I’m not suggesting that we assume the absolute worst, but we need to recognize that whatever the data says, the situation is almost definitely worse than that due to these biases.
Oh I’m sure it’s definitely worse than the data we have suggests. I’m not arguing against police reforms or standardization. But in the situation I stated, there were a large percentage of people who believed it was in the thousands, or 10s of thousands on an annual basis.
The prevailing opinions and rhetoric on police paint them not as individuals, but as a cabal of cartoon villains.
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There are crazy, dangerous people in the world. If you can’t fight and you don’t own a gun, you are at the mercy of others to protect you.
Nothing about this is anecdotal.
You’re right, it’s a broad generalization followed by a fear-based assumption.
That you segued into with an anecdote.
Okay.
What if I’m physically disabled? Which literally everyone is, in relation to a stronger individual or group (and there’s literally always someone/something bigger than you)… Does that mean I don’t have the “right” to be anti-murder, even if the murderer is someone with a badge?
Or maybe there’s a sliding scale, with how much of a position of principle that I’m allowed hold correlating proportionally to how much I can bench or how quickly I can subdue an opponent?
That sounds pretty fascist.
Does that mean I don’t have the “right” to be anti-murder
I’m not going to take your bad-faith arguments seriously. Goodbye.
It’s exaggerated to make a point, not a bad-faith argument. Try reading the rest of the comment, boss…
Your position appears to rest on the idea that people who need protection somehow don’t have the right to hold positions of principle against murdering police that in theory might also protect them in some scenario. Idk, it sounds either fascist, or like you really haven’t thought things through enough…
Sure.
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Just saw a video on
Is this the video you saw?
There are crazy, dangerous people in the world.
Yes. And they become a whole lot more dangerous once they get a badge.
No, Clyde… there is no such thing as a “good” cop.
Okay. Call up your friend who can’t fight and doesn’t own a gun to protect you when someone wants something you have.
Do you think cops can teleport or something
No, that’s why we should also have the means to defend ourselves. It doesn’t make sense to hate cops while you’re incapable of defending yourself.
Funny how you completely ignore that part of my argument, lol.
…isn’t there a way to legally request any video footage? That’s how all those body-cam yt channels get their footage from, by placing requests in. I thought it was a federal law that you can obtain any police cam video.
Yes you can request the footage, and they can also bury you in red tape until you give up the request.
So many yt channels gotta be buried. Kinda hard to understand why creators would keep doing that, right?
Because the footage those auditors have are just 1st amendment other rights violations.
There are worst things the police want buried.
Pretty sure that’s USA’s Freedom of information Act.
Depends on your location. Washington has some of the best public records laws in the country. SPD releases all body cam footage when their officers kill someone. Unfortunately it’s deceptively edited and when you request the full footage it takes about 2 years where they tell you every month they’re delaying because of Covid or something.
Police will hide as long as possible and destroy evidence when they can get away with it. SPD has been sued for deleting vehicle footage after public records requests for the footage. Now they just edit the footage to look like there’s nothing to see and hope no one requests the full videos.
Wonder why that is…
In ‘news that was incredibly obvious from the start’…no shit sherlock.
