You know what really gets me about body cams?
Not that they aren’t mandated to be used by all police officers, no that’s not it. Not that they are often crappy quality, that’s not it either. It’s not even that they are often positioned in a way that their view will be obstructed.
Though those are complaints I have, they’re not as big as this one: the ability for the officer to determine when a recording will take place.
That really annoys me. We often see how conveniently, the video will stop just before a critical moment in the suspect’s arrest, or the video starts only after an incident already took place. Both scenarios often leave room for doubt about what really happened next.
I think the solution for this would be to have the bodycams on a recording loop. End of story.
Everything a cop does during the course of his duties, especially those duties that require interaction with the public should be recorded, at all times.
It would work like this. Officer checks into work, suits up and begins their shift. As the officer walks out ready to serve and protect the public, bodycam is already active and ready to go. Nowadays memory is cheap and incredibly small, batteries are getting cheaper and better also, but if they can carry 6 magazines and 4 pairs of handcuffs and another 20lbs of tactical gear, they can carry an extra battery pack too, remember it’s for officer safety!
You can easily have 1080p quality recording on a continuous loop for 1 hour with a few GB of space. I believe that 64GB to 128GB would be enough to support my proposition. The loop is the critical part. Currently, it seems like in some systems, there’s a 30-second loop. This means that when the officer activates the bodycam, the bodycam starts saving the video. But it actually starts saving it to memory 30 seconds prior to the officer activating the camera.
In these cases, technically the camera is “on” the whole time, but it just isn’t recording permanently, anything that happened longer than 30 seconds ago wouldn’t be saved to memory. Did I explain that right?
I hope I did, but that’s where I have a problem. After seeing thousands of videos of police interactions, 30 seconds is just not enough. For officer safety, for citizens’ safety and for transparency and accountability, I would make this 1 hour before and 1 hour after each interaction.
Now there’s the issue of the officer being in control of when to actually activate the camera. I would address this with a 2-pronged approach. First, a policy that every single interaction must be recorded. Second, a process to enforce and review this policy.
The policy is simple, even one line will do, here it is: During the course of your duties, you must have your bodycam active when interacting with any member of the public at any time, in any location. Then barring actual malfunction, the cameras would be on at all times.
The reason I say 1 hour is because we’ve seen many cases where an investigation would be cleared quickly if we had footage of what happened leading up to the event. Could be the actions of a suspect or the actions of a police officer, it keeps everyone in check. I also think that it should remain in recording mode for at least 20 minutes after it is “deactivated.”
To be clear, this means that it would be the same system as they have now, except when the officer activates the camera, it would start saving to memory from 59 minutes prior, then when the officer finishes the encounter, it would stay recording for 20 minutes. This would immediately raise the transparency and accountability issues as well as help in the resolution of any investigations.
One more thing I would add to the system, and I think it’s already implemented in some cases is the following. I would make the bodycam save to local storage, but also synchronize automatically and immediately upon connecting back to the vehicle’s receiving unit, or directly to the station over WiFi or cell communications.
Another reason to make it as long as an hour is this, dispatch should be able to also activate the camera remotely. This designed again, for officer safety. Imagine the case where a police officer is incapacitated and can’t be located, the camera could serve as a tool to help responders find the officer. Like a kidnapping for example, or inside a building, or any other number of scenarios.
The other reason is that in case the officer is surprised, attacked or thrust into a situation where he forgets or is unable to activate the camera, dispatch can turn it on remotely when they see it hasn’t been activated yet. And as a last resort, the officer could activate the recording even 10 minutes or 20 minutes later after being caught by surprise by any number of incidents and the system would still record enough evidence to help investigators determine what happened.
There are tons of ways I can think of for the camera to get activated. Leaving a vehicle, for example, could activate the camera just by RFID or proximity sensors. Turning on the sirens. Unbuckling their gun holster. Inserting their baton into their baton ring (or whatever is called).
Do you get my drift? This is 2018, the technology is there. The rest of the excuses police officers, district attorneys, city managers and all the other characters often complicit in cover-ups make up are just excuses.
Memory is cheap, storage is cheap, telecommunications are pretty much everywhere. If police departments can afford to militarize their departments with armored vehicles, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, riot gear then they must make this work.
This is not only an opportunity for smart enterprises to fill this need at a good price point but also an opportunity for police departments to truly become part of the community they work for.
We need accountability and they’re always concerned with officer’s safety, I get it. They picked a risky profession. Don’t we want them as safe as possible and able to protect themselves with objective video-can’t-lie evidence?
