Minneapolis police officers must keep body cameras turned on during entire response to a call, new policy says

Authored by edition.cnn.com and submitted by dlkapt3

(CNN) Minneapolis police officers will no longer be allowed to deactivate their body cameras in order to hold private conversations during the course of their response to an incident, according to a statement Monday from Mayor Jacob Frey and Chief Medaria Arradondo.

Policy changes already adopted include requiring police to announce their presence and purpose before entering a no-knock warrant situations, except in certain circumstances like hostage standoffs, and banning the use of chokeholds . The city has also revised the policy regarding the review of body camera footage after a critical incident, overhauled its use-of-force policy, and added an embedded assistant city attorney to advise on police misconduct investigations, according to the press statement from the mayor and police chief.

"Strengthening accountability and increasing transparency have been cornerstones of our community safety work," Mayor Frey said in the joint statement. "This update helps leadership provide a more complete and accurate picture during and after incidents, and puts officers in a better position to hold each other accountable."

The latest policy, which is slated to take effect February 4, "is designed to increase accountability and transparency within MPD," the statement said.

itsthewhiskeytalking on February 2nd, 2021 at 13:58 UTC »

Why would you even have body cams if they weren’t on during the entire call? Isn’t that the fucking point?

Edit: a lot of responses to this are citing issues with storage for data, amount of unnecessary recording of someone just driving around, the current system where the cameras only start recording when/if a confrontation starts, etc. IMO the storage problem is just something that isn’t a problem. Data storage is dirt cheap even for terabytes of info. If it’s boring footage for most, good, I hope it is. And if the fail safe worked and did turn the cameras on, we wouldn’t have the current problems, would we?! Quite frankly I feel like if you are carrying a weapon with readily lethal capabilities in the course of your job, every time you are deployed into an area that could potentially see the discharge of aforementioned weapon, your actions need to be available for review.

pissyjerk on February 2nd, 2021 at 13:16 UTC »

Couple things stand out. The officers still have the ability to turn the cameras off and on themselves, then:

"Under this policy update, any conversations between officers captured in the footage regarding their performance or tactics can still be redacted prior to public release, according to the statement."

So they give themselves the right to edit the video if they capture the officers doing or saying anything against policy, or more to the point anything incriminating or illegal.

brknsoul on February 2nd, 2021 at 13:03 UTC »

IMO, body cams should be active from clock-on to clock-off. Yup, I definately wanna see 8 hours of paperwork!