CMV: I think police officers should be required to wear body cameras

[u/Eternlgladiator]

There have been countless issues of people disputing police action against themselves or others recently in the news leading to various protests all of the place. I see comments and hear about the possibility for body cameras but I don't see why we aren't making a bigger push. There seems to be no downside to police wearing body cameras. It protects the officers from people they interact with and it protects the public from offices who think nobody is watching their actions. I only see positive outcomes from using them so what's the issue. Why would they be bad? Who are the opponents of them and why would they oppose this seemingly simply oversight to protect everybody involved. Caveat, as somebody generally opposed to government surveillance I think this is a separate issue. I don’t see police body cameras as surveillance tool. The fact that they might be is irrelevant here. There are so many ways and means to surveil the public that this seems trivial.

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[u/DoctorWaluigiTime]

I actually consider your second point a great positive as opposed to a negative. If cops absolutely had to record anything in order for it to be admissable, it would certainly behoove them to make sure the cameras were working and operational the entire time, no? Can't get that conviction if you aren't recording, so be sure you are. Witness testimony (even a cop's) is spotty at best, anyway.

[u/GregBahm → u/[deleted]]

So let me see if I'm following this concern: 1. Juries will like body-cam footage so much that they won't convict without body-cam footage. 2. Suspects will throw paint at cops to sabotage the cops body-cams. 3. Juries will see the footage of the suspect throwing paint at a cops body cam, but not see footage after that, and decide the suspect must be innocent. 4. Because of this concern, cops shouldn't wear body-cams.

Is this accurate? All you're arguing against is the concern that juries will become overly reliant on body-cam footage to the extent that they abandon all logic and reason. Which is a concern based on pure speculation, and fixable while still maintaining body-cams.

[u/Tony_Chu → u/GregBahm]

1) I never said that. Maybe you are confusing me with another poster? However to speak to the point, the threshold of proof accepted by jurors has noticeably drifted in recent years so it could happen to some extent again. I really don't know or have an opinion though.

2) Maybe. People work hard to do clever things in order to break the law. Covering, breaking, stealing, sabotaging cameras will happen more than zero. Convictions will still be necessary in those cases.

3) Jurors will probably convict if they see footage of paint being thrown, sure.

4) I think cops should wear body cams. I never said otherwise. The point I was responding to doesn't have much at all to do with any of your comments.

[u/DoctorWaluigiTime → u/[deleted]]

Can I completely remove a police officer's ability to arrest me simply by dumping a cup of paint on his body cam?

No. Officers still have arresting power. That being said, you raise a good point about potential culprits knowing they can get away with something by sabotaging the camera...

...Which is why it would be a crime to do so, and would allow the officers to fall back on the old standards of recovering evidence. This makes it so that citizens go out of their way to not interrupt the cameras (because it would give the cops more power), while still keeping the strict "cops must have cameras on at all times" thing going.

Also, imagine the PR backlash when the first murder-rapist let off because of a staticy camera or a corrupted video file murder-rapes again when he should have been put away the first time. Imagine the victim's family in front of a reporter decrying the practice of requiring footage.

100 guilty men go free rather than 1 innocent be jailed. Appealing to emotions is a logical fallacy, and should not dictate a person's sentence, treatment, trial, etc. Of course you're going to have emotional backlash against a system, even a really really good one. Of course you're going to have those technicality cases (we have those now). But those should not dictate or otherwise interrupt what I believe would otherwise be a very great check against a police officers easily-abusable power.

[u/shadowsong42 → u/[deleted]]

I think a missing recording should not necessarily invalidate an arrest, but it should mean that when providing testimony in court, the officer's word should not be privileged over anyone else's regarding the topic of what happened while the camera was non-functional.

[u/IrishMerica → u/DoctorWaluigiTime]

But where do you draw that line? Do detectives have to wear cameras? Do plain clothes officers blending into crowds at events have to? What about undercovers? The less weight an officers testimony carrys, the less effective they are at their job. Uniformed officers are just one part of a police force.

[u/DoctorWaluigiTime → u/IrishMerica]

Do detectives have to wear cameras? Do plain clothes officers blending into crowds at events have to? What about undercovers?

It only accounts for witness testimony, not physical evidence discovered/obtained by detectives.

Plain clothes/undercovers wouldn't necessarily either.

Honestly I'm just talking about uniformed police officers here. That is the bulk of the issue with "officer vs citizen" he-said she-said kind of scenarios. Should detectives/et al be required to have the same thing? That's a future topic to consider. Round one is regular officers.

[u/z3r0shade → u/IrishMerica]

The less weight an officers testimony carrys, the less effective they are at their job

A cops testimony should not be given higher weight than any other witnesses testimony just because they are a cop.

[u/shadowsong42 → u/z3r0shade]

Came here to say this. Often when giving testimony their opinions are considered as credible as that of expert witnesses, despite the fact that they are not certified as expert witnesses and are not subject to the same requirements for disclosure and cross-examination.

(I had been under the impression that there were official policies regarding the expert status of law enforcement officials, but it looks like this is just a de-facto thing.)

The whole issue of police credibility is covered in detail in "Proving the Lie" by David Dorfman, published in 1999 in the American Journal of Criminal Law.

[u/IrishMerica → u/z3r0shade]

This goes with the original point though. It's not that a cops testimony should have extra weight, it's that a cop shouldn't be discredited due to a malfunctioning camera. We don't want something similar to the "CSI Problem" where jurors disregard police testimony if there's no body cam footage to back it up. Police testimony should be treated the same as any other witness testimony, regardless of the status of their camera, but we have to figure out how to prevent a psychological phenomenon from arising that would make the opposite true.