After months of delays, the New York City Police Department issued its proposal to outfit its entire force with body cameras. Once approved by its court-appointed monitor, it will dictate how officers will be required to use the cameras.
The proposal outlines when the cameras should be used, and how the resulting footage will be stored and accessed. The policy dictates that all cameras will be activated during “all enforcement and investigative encounters,” and that officers must inform their subjects that they’re recording. The rules also note that the cameras must be deactivated during meetings with confidential informants, during demonstrations (unless there is a crime being committed), sex crimes victims, and internal meetings. 1,200 officers around the city are to be issued the cameras by the end of the month, according to The Associated Press, while the rest of the force is expected to have them issued by the end of 2019.
Officers will receive a day-long training on how to operate the devices, and will also be able to review their own footage and that of their colleagues during official duties. Footage will be retained for up to a year, although some videos can be stored longer on a case-by-case basis.
The policy has been criticized from all sides
The policy has been criticized by some advocacy groups, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, which claim that officers will have too much discretion over when they can turn the cameras on, and when they can view the footage. At the same time, unions representing captains, detectives, and lieutenants intend to go to court to stop the rollout of the devices, saying that they were not consulted on the policy.
In January, city officials announced that all of its patrol officers will be issued the cameras by the end of 2019, after a year of work between various city stakeholders. The use of body cameras has risen among police departments across the United States, spurred on by a number of high profile deaths of civilians at the hands of officers in the last couple of years. While body camera footage has been useful to prosecutors and advocates, this footage can be incomplete, or deleted.
jMyles on April 9th, 2017 at 16:23 UTC »
Body cameras are a great idea, but they're only as good as their uptime. As the article points out, some groups, such as NYCLU, are raising legitimate questions about what this proposal does to combat what we've already seen: a rash of cameras being turned off or "malfunctioning" in order to enable official perjury. We live in an age when cryptographic signing and hardware elegance can make these problems things of the past; do we have the political will to hold police *truly* accountable? In any case, the sensible course of action is to record all police encounters, regardless of whether the state does likewise.
Waffleici on April 9th, 2017 at 15:54 UTC »
If I was a cop I would want this as it would protect me from false claims and put every encounter into context. We could definitively look at the tape and see that he did indeed have a knife and charged the officers, resulting in a shooting, etc.
Cmgordon3 on April 9th, 2017 at 15:48 UTC »
I mean i dont see why anyone would have a problem with this. If anything, it would benefit the PO's from people claiming that they "beat them" when in reality theh just smashed their face on the ground to make it look that way or some other thing like that. Also (theoretically) it gets the full story of the incident instead of the usual "he said she said" arguement in court