Police Bodycams - One Less Excuse

[White Haven]

Taser International revealed on Wednesday that not only will it change its name and ticker, but that it is launching a program to equip every U.S. police officer with a body camera, free of charge.

The law enforcement technology giant, now known as Axon, said in a press release that the program will also provide police departments with supporting hardware, software, data storage and training, all free for one year.

"We believe these cameras are more than just tools to protect communities and the officers who serve them. They also hold the potential to change police work as we know it, by seamlessly collecting an impartial record and reducing the need for endless paperwork," Rick Smith, founder and CEO of the Arizona-based business, said in the release.

Axon's offer comes in response to what the release classified as an increasingly challenging environment for police officers. "Limited resources, lack of staffing, and equipment issues" were among the top issues listed.

Body cameras would eliminate the need for time-consuming handwritten police reports, and combined with artificial intelligence, would streamline the reporting process for officers, the press release said.

"With this connected network of devices, apps, and people, officers can operate with confidence and focus on what matters: the people and community they serve," the release said.

The one-year trial offer includes one Axon Body 2 camera per officer, unlimited data storage on Evidence.com, two mounts per officer, a docking station for securely uploading footage and access to Axon Academy's entire online training library.

"Departments end up purchasing technology without the input of the people who use it every day, often with dismal results," the release said.

Axon's aim is to provide police departments in the United States with the technology so that officers — frontline officers in particular — can effectively try it, learn how to use it and offer insight on how best to implement it.

While Taser will remain one of the company's trademark products, the company attributed its name and ticker change to changing times and a burgeoning business.

"We are changing our name from TASER to Axon to reflect the evolution of our company from a weapons manufacturing company to a full solutions provider of cloud and mobile software, connected devices, wearable cameras, and now artificial intelligence," the release said.

The new ticker, AAXN, will become effective at market open on Thursday, April 6. Management will hold a conference call for investors at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

Looks like someone decided to take 'b-b-but expensiiiiive...' out of the list of excuses for US police departments to fail to employ bodycams. Sure, it's a PR stunt to a certain extent, launching their new brand with a bang. Sure, it'll make them money in the long run if they can corner the market. Don't care, still a damned good outcome.

[General Zod]

Looks like someone decided to take 'b-b-but expensiiiiive...' out of the list of excuses for US police departments to fail to employ bodycams. Sure, it's a PR stunt to a certain extent, launching their new brand with a bang. Sure, it'll make them money in the long run if they can corner the market. Don't care, still a damned good outcome.

Tax writeoff.

[White Haven]

And?

[K. A. Pital]

What is good about total suveillance, though?

Expanding the concept of Panopticon the British prison to the entire society?

[Ralin]

What is good about total suveillance, though?

Expanding the concept of Panopticon the British prison to the entire society?

Making it harder for cops to murder or brutalize people on a whim and lie about it afterward. Obviously.

[K. A. Pital]

That is only if you trust the people who hold the records to be trustworthy and not make them disappear at whim. And if you trust them not to misuse the mass collected personal data.

[Tribble]

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37502136

According to this article, trials showed that the use of police body cameras reduced complaints made against the police by 93%. K. A. Pital's evil western capitalist conspiracy plots aside, if this study is accurate body cameras clearly have the potential to have a major impact on both police and public conduct. When everyone knows they are on camera, they tend to act differently - which is the whole point. And if nothing else, this reduces police officers' needs to maintain second by second descriptions in their memo books, which is a very tedious affair and subject to all sorts of challenges.

That's not to say that body cameras are infallible or that police officers / public can find ways around them, but they are useful tools. I've always found it strange that in a world where everyone is recording everything via their cellphones police officers are still not being equipped with something as basic as a camera.

[The Romulan Republic]

Sadly, we largely live in a post-privacy world. And if we're going to have a surveillance state, then at least everyone should be being surveilled equally, especially those in positions of power. I'm all for police body cameras, and see little reason to oppose them other than to conceal police misconduct and hinder accountability.

[Raj Ahten]

The real catch with the proposal is the actual camera hardware is the cheapest part of body cameras for the police. The contract for video storage which is pretty much in perpetuity is the expensive part. Remember all those recordings are evidence and must be preserved. That is where Taser makes it's money.

[Zixinus]

What I wonder is how the hell will all of it be stored. A lot of data will accumulate over time and how will they tell which recordings to keep and which not? With cameras attached to tasers, their use would be obviously documented when the taser is readied. With a body cam, how much footage should be kept of an officer's day? Where will it be stored?

[Joun_Lord]

This seems like a win for everyone. Some company that has gotten some bad press because its products are misused gets massive good press and a door into every police department, citizens know that cops are going to be less likely to do something heinous with the never blinking electronic eye recording encounters, and honest cops have far less to worry about with bogus claims.

Cops, with the exception of privacy issues, should love body cams. You shoot somebody nobody can say you did police brutality or he didn't have a gun or his hands were up or anything, you have evidence showing exactly what happened. Any false allegation become pointless and easily disproved. There would be no question of what happened or trial by media with rampant speculation, you have video evidence showing exactly what happened.

Now I can see some worries about privacy but its not like cops have much expectation of privacy on the jobs. I doubt the body cams can't be shut off when Officer McPoliceman wants to go take a dump. I also doubt that it will be policy for cops to wear the cams all the time or any other outlandish theory people might put forward.

Body cameras aren't perfect, might no capture everything, might not be used for plain clothes and undercover officers, probably won't help off duty police involved in incidences, and as others wondered whos going to be handling the data but overall I think body cams are a net positive for everyone.

[General Zod]

What I wonder is how the hell will all of it be stored. A lot of data will accumulate over time and how will they tell which recordings to keep and which not? With cameras attached to tasers, their use would be obviously documented when the taser is readied. With a body cam, how much footage should be kept of an officer's day? Where will it be stored?

If the case was closed with no conviction delete the footage after the statute of limitations expires? You're still talking about a grotesque amount of data but it can't be worse than all the boxes of physical paperwork they have already.

In theory the officers should transfer all the footage from their cameras at the station at the end of the day. Not on their own but hand it over to techs that do the work.

[Ralin]

That is only if you trust the people who hold the records to be trustworthy and not make them disappear at whim.

Mmm, no, the fact that there's a chance that some police will try to fuck with them doesn't change the fact that they make for an useful tool in dealing with abuses. But way to pretend you weren't deliberately playing dumb

And if you trust them not to misuse the mass collected personal data.

Move them goal posts.

[Zixinus]

It IS easier to write the report however you want in a hand-written report than it is to alter or delete videos. Yes, the videos can be deleted but that's tempering with evidence. That's kind of different to having a report whose authority you can't question without questioning reputation or integrity of character.

[Terralthra]

It's a win for Taser, who make enough money from their other products to absorb the (low) cost of giving away a bunch of cameras. It's a lose for pretty much every other body camera manufacturer, who can not. After all of them are driven out of business, it's even more of a win for Taser, who will have a monopoly. Good job on Taser for putting a good PR spin on predatory pricing, though. Probably earned a bonus for whomever thought of it.

[Zaune]

That is only if you trust the people who hold the records to be trustworthy and not make them disappear at whim. And if you trust them not to misuse the mass collected personal data.

It's not that hard to detect or prevent tampering with video evidence. And if the authorities aren't just looking the other way on police brutality but actively colluding to protect those committing it then the police should be treated as a hostile occupation force to be resisted by any means available anyway, in which case the whole excessive-force issue becomes somewhat academic.

[Simon_Jester]

What is good about total suveillance, though?

Expanding the concept of Panopticon the British prison to the entire society?

I think the idea is to create a panopticon... and put the police inside it, as the inmates

[K. A. Pital]

Sorry, but I don't buy the idea you need a surveillance state to have a decent life (or decent police).

So you've lost my support at the moment you have suggested total surveillance. I don't change my positions so easily.

[Tribble]

Sorry, but I don't buy the idea you need a surveillance state to have a decent life (or decent police).

So you've lost my support at the moment you have suggested total surveillance. I don't change my positions so easily.

You are aware that anything you say and do around a police officer can already be used against you in court via officers' testimony, right? Why do you prefer the courts relying solely on someone's word over a recording, even if the odds of that person's testimony being inaccurate (whether purposely or not) is far greater than the video recording? Should we also ban videos from police cruisers? Interrogation rooms? Jails? If not, why are you ok with those things while being against police body cams, particularly since the public is already recording things via their cameras and cellphones en masse? Should we be banning the public from recording as well? I find the idea of police officers being prohibited from recording video while the civilian population already does so all the time to be rather silly. It's not like this is cutting edge technology anymore.

[Block]

I don't get why you all seem to think giving a private company access to all this footage is ok. You can poo poo all you want, but they will find ways to profit off your data that's more than just storage.

[Tribble]

I don't get why you all seem to think giving a private company access to all this footage is ok. You can poo poo all you want, but they will find ways to profit off your data that's more than just storage.

After re-reading the article I do have issues with this particular case, for the reasons you just described. However I am in support of police body cameras in general. They are a tool like anything else, and if properly handled can be very useful.

[Block]

I'm absolutely supportive of them as well. I have no problem with the cameras being commercially produced either, because that's pretty much a necessity, as is the software production, unless state/federal standard programs are created and distributed. The storage and access is where I have the issue, and especially when done as part of a SaaS/HaaS/whatever that includes datamining on demand.

[Ralin]

Sorry, but I don't buy the idea you need a surveillance state to have a decent life (or decent police).

So you've lost my support at the moment you have suggested total surveillance. I don't change my positions so easily.

How the hell many cops do you think we have in the US? If we wanted to set up a 'surveillance state' there are way more efficient ways to do it than having cops wear porta-cams, and it wouldn't carry the risk of backlash from police unions. Having a camera on every corner and building would give much more reliable coverage than this. See: London.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.

[Agent Fisher]

What I wonder is how the hell will all of it be stored. A lot of data will accumulate over time and how will they tell which recordings to keep and which not? With cameras attached to tasers, their use would be obviously documented when the taser is readied. With a body cam, how much footage should be kept of an officer's day? Where will it be stored?

In theory the officers should transfer all the footage from their cameras at the station at the end of the day. Not on their own but hand it over to techs that do the work.

I'll answer a bit of these questions, since I've been using a Taser Axon Flex system since 2013 at work. We now use Dropbox for our video storage, so the security officers who use an Axon have to label the videos and upload them at the end of shift manually. At first, we were using Evidence.com, the access portal that Taser originally set up and gave a free year of access to when you buy a camera system. So, you go about your shift, make a dozen videos of various contacts, you get back to the station and turn in the Axon camera to be plugged in and charged. The charging ports for the Axon were also connected online, so once you plug it in at the end of shift, it'd upload the video to the cloud storage. Once there, it's listed as unsorted (unless sorted via the Axon phone app). The next day, the officer will log into their profile. They'll then sort the video by category (We used a number of categorys such as General Contacts, witness statements, alarm response, minor incidents, major incidents, use of force, and a bunch of other categories). Each category can be set for how long they keep a video, for example something listed as a general contact with no serious issues (like dealing with solicitors trespassing in the community) would be kept for three months. A major incident, or use of force, would have no deletion date. So while you will build up a lot of data, it will be pruning itself constantly as videos needed for minor crimes can either be purged out, or offloaded to another storage system if you don't need easy access that you would get with the Evidence.com system. You could also sort the video to be deleted, and it would remain for three days in case an administrator wanted to review it and prevent it from being deleted, so no officer can delete a video on their own before it's uploaded to the storage.

Once a video is sorted, an officer can attach IR numbers (Incident Report), descriptions, locations. An officer can take a video clip from the recording, but it will be tagged as 'Video clipped from (file name/number) from time stamp 3:30 to 5:45'. It will also tag that clip with the officer's name, and it will tag the original video with a note that a portion was copied into a new video.

[NecronLord]

Now I can see some worries about privacy but its not like cops have much expectation of privacy on the jobs. I doubt the body cams can't be shut off when Officer McPoliceman wants to go take a dump. I also doubt that it will be policy for cops to wear the cams all the time or any other outlandish theory people might put forward.

I would imagine a proper use would be like the UK, where police - apart from detectives - must wear their uniform with service numbers clearly visible for their duties to be valid (IE so that people can identify them for complaint purposes). IE if there's no camera footage of a stop and arrest, it is not legal. A british policeman cannot perform a search or lawfully arrest someone when he's taken his shirt off to have a dump, he must put them on, unless he's in CID, as mentioned.

Sure, the police could in principle form out-of-uniform death squads, but that doesn't mean having clear evidence of a stop and the details of it wouldn't be useful. It'd stop the police planting evidence for instance.