At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.
In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.
Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.
ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.
we get it. cops are cowards. why else would this be one of the only countries where officers are lethally armed around the clock. cowards.
And cowardice bred from ignorance and stupidity. It’s not even that dangerous of a job comparatively. And many including myself believe it would be even less dangerous if they stopped arming themselves like they’re going to war.
It would be nice if counties stopped allowing them to buy armoured vehicles and … this is a big one … gave every one of them a psych eval prior to hiring.
They need a third party psychological deprogramming once per year. They’re hired and paid based on the fact that they won’t question the way they enforce laws and the tactics that they use.
Police forces are working exactly as intended. The reason they aren’t changing is because they protect the ruling class by intimidating the public. As long as the ruling class is protected, there will be no reason to fund psych evals; there will be no reason to hire decent human beings.
They need to not exist as we understand police.
cops should be tested for steroid use randomly and monthly.
My guess as long as 320 million people have 434 million legal firearms the cops are not going to give theirs up either.
There’s a lot of things we need to do if we want police officers to remain armed.
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Require officers to always patrol in doubles or more. (Many of the police involved shootings are panic shootings. A buddy who can help would reduce this.)
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Require less than lethal force at least be attempted unless you’re already getting shot at. (Currently police can shoot you if you twitch wrong or just have an object in plain sight like a gun, knife, or cellphone. We know this because they’ve done it and had no reprecussions. So now they lose the shoot first privilege.)
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Ban them from conducting traffic stops. Stand up an unarmed traffic specific force that doesn’t have the authority to arrest anyone or run warrants. They are specifically for civil traffic enforcement. (Many police involved shootings stem from stupid things like something hanging from the mirror or even just going 10 over the limit.) To be clear, you’d still need police officers for things like DUI. Felony speeding and such can be handled with cameras and actually taking cars away. Yes that’s harsh in the US, but see how fast people decide it’s not worth their car to go faster. (And yes speed is directly related to more accidents and fatalities in those accidents.)
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Required marksmanship and tactical training. You don’t get to carry a gun you haven’t certified in and certification is a bit more intense than beer and bullets with your buddies at the range. If you want to tell us you’re constantly at war then bring in some combat infantry veterans to design your certification program. Something like 90% hit rate on random targets while your heart is in the cardio zone and someone is randomly setting off artillery simulators. Yes that’s well above what the Army or Marines officially requires but you keep telling us how highly trained you are and how dangerous your job is. Prove it with the drills we did before combat deployments.
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Always on cameras with gunshot detectors. When the detector goes off it automatically starts uploading a feed to the ACLU. If your camera is conveniently blocked then not only do you not get qualified immunity but it’s also a sentence enhancement if you’re convicted and charges for destroying evidence.
We act like there’s a binary solution to the problem of police accountability. But it doesn’t have to be binary. The only unacceptable thing at this point is to continue allowing police to have all the power and none of the accountability.
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why else would this be one of the only countries where officers are lethally armed around the clock
Because it’s also the only country where many citizens are lethally armed around the clock I’d guess
If you stop a random person in traffic in Europe for routine control then it’s extremely unlikely that they have a gun in their car and even less likely that they will pull it on you.
If you are permanently having to think about scenarios where random people pull a gun on you because it’s not a very unlikely situation to happen then it’s not unreasonable to expect certain paranoia to start to form…
While the stats for “people killed by police” are always shown around I’d guess that the “police killed by citizens” also is much higher in the US.
Gun control is the only solution that even has a chance to remove this spiralling violence of trigger happy cops imho
Google tells me that less than 2% of Americans carry a gun.
I’d guess a police officer is seeing more than 50 random people a day though which makes it a daily occurrence to be in contact with people carrying which actually strengthens my point
You’d think at some point they’d adapt to the stress of such a situation (especially since they literally signed up for it, and ostensibly trained for it), so that they can handle it effectively without murdering others, though…
Soldiers fighting wars in hostile countries are (in theory) held to higher standards in this way.
A cashier at Taco Bell sees more than that.
If nothing else, the lack of shown footage should be shifting some mindsets about police.
“What a load of criminals complaining about everything. Obviously, our boys in blue would never do anything suspect, as you’ll see now that they can show you footage of their own perfectly orderly arrests.”
“They all keep their cameras off and never turn over body cam footage.”
“B-…huh? But…they’re noble protectors that have nothing to hide…! Why would they…?”Conservatives will literally reply to that with:
Sotimes you gotta rough up the bad guys so they learn not to do it. It’s a cops god given right to sort out the bad apples like that, they just turn the cam off because the LIBRULS would take them over coals for doing gods work
Conservatives just like seeing police beat up those they disagree with.
Minorities*
same thing
The violence is the point, not an accident, which is kind of honestly hard to wrap your head around if you are a normal well adjusted human being.
…most of the footage is kept from public view
Well yeah, unedited video footage has this odd tendency to exonerate the innocent and impugn the guilty
Hear me out on this, but I don’t think the public should be seeing most body cam footage. I don’t think anyone should be seeing most bodycam footage, including the officer that shot the video and their department.
When I inform a cop of a crime, I don’t particularly want that conversation released to the general public. While I don’t technically have “privacy” while providing such a tip, I don’t think it unreasonable that my identity and information should be held in fairly strict confidence.
Body cam footage isn’t supposed to be released under public records requests. Metadata indicating that footage was shot at a particular time and place should be released, but the footage itself should only be accessible with a subpoena. Not even the cop who shot it should have access to that footage without a subpoena. That footage should go into a black hole, and only be pulled out with judicial oversight. Only the metadata should be widely available, to inform potential complainants of what video they can subpoena.
The video should be easily accessible to complainants, plaintiffs, or defendants through subpoena, but that’s about it.
At the same time, I think a body camera should serve as an officer’s time clock. They should only be paid while their camera is turned on, and they should not be entitled to any privileges, powers, or protections afforded to law enforcement officers (especially including qualified immunity) while scheduled to work, but not on camera.
Absolutely not. That defeats the entire purpose. Foia requests should 100% be answered.
An officer wears a body camera. A confidential informant against the mafia runs up to him in the street and starts talking to him.
A mafia lawyer files a FOIA request for the body camera video of every officer in the department.
Should the department comply with this FOIA request, give up the video and expose the informant to the mafia?
Should the officer be allowed to leave his camera off throughout the day, so as to avoid creating a record that he would be forced to turn over?
Suppose I were to SWAT you. I spoof your number, call the police, tell them I’m you, get them to raid “my” house. They get all geared up, turn in their cameras, raid your house, discover it was a prank. Should I, or anyone I tell, now be allowed to file a FOIA request for their video footage, and publish it “for the lulz”?
The idealistic, absolute position you took here would be ripe for abuse.
I want those cameras running all day long. They should be incorporated into the officer’s badge, and have no “off” setting. It should be recording from the time they take it off the charger at the start of their shift, and should keep running until they put it back on the charger after their shift.
The only way that level of intrusiveness is feasible is if nobody - and I mean nobody - can view that video without a warrant or a subpoena.
Obviously that’s not an artist situation. Easy appendage to the law. Arrests can’t be done with cameras off and turning a camera off should automatically be logged. Therefore a cup who presses the button to turn one off before an arrest should be subject to firing and prosecution. Pressing the button before a your convo with an informant should be no big deal.
Welcome to nuance. It’s where we don’t blanket accept manipulation and bullying just to avoid a particular specific scenario included in the blanket.
Also yeah, why shouldn’t a SWAT be recorded and subject to request?
We also can’t rule out technical failure. That’s why they should be tamper resistant and have a log for button presses, GPS data, and automatically report. I don’t wanna see a cop be prosecuted because some tech fucked up on them.
Also yeah, why shouldn’t a SWAT be recorded and subject to request?
You failed to comprehend that situation. You do not appear to understand the concept of “swatting” if you believe it even remotely reasonable to release that camera footage.
Humans are notoriously bad at consistently following requirements. If your system requires extensive human interaction in real time, your system will also require tolerance for mistakes that humans consistently make when given only split seconds to consider their decisions. The exemplar scenarios I presented demand significantly more thought and consideration than a single officer’s quick decision as to whether or not to record. Cases should not succeed or fail, and confidence should not be kept or broken on a single officer’s split second decision as to whether his camera should be on or off at a particular moment.
With your system, cameras will occasionally be off when they should be on. That’s just human fallibility. No amount of punishment will ever prevent an honest mistake.
We can’t get footage if it was never recorded, so we should err on the side of creating the recording. But, we cannot allow the existence of a recording to create unnecessary harm, either to the officer or to members of the public.
We don’t need to see any video where there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. When there is a suspicion, we need that camera to have been on. My approach systematically solves both problems; your approach does not.
The problem there is that neither political party can reconcile this untrustworthiness of police with in their party line.
I think to some degree this is tripped up by the parties positions on guns: Republican party messaging is pro-cop, but cannot trust police so much that it undermines the pro-gun position that you cannot actually trust police to be the only ones capable of protecting you. Conversely Democrat party’s messaging sort of distrusts police, but cannot openly distrust them to a degree that reconciles with actually NOT trusting them to be your only line of defense as it undermines this core political position that it is wrong for citizens to have the means for armed self-defense.
I disagree. Both parties want the objective viewpoint that cameras provide. Democrats primarily out of distrust of cops; Republicans out of distrust of the general public.
Cops generally want cameras, but don’t want to be subjected to micromanaging and administrative abuse.
I had to file a report to an officer against a family member. Definitely would suck if that went public for some reason.
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Claim that reform will do thing.
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Reform fails to do thing.
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Cries of surprise from assembly.
The problem is that the reform was supposed to add accountability. But if the public can’t access the footage and police are free to “accidentally” turn their bodycams off before or “oopsie woopsie I deleted the footage” after they break the law there’s zero accountability, and therefore no meaningful reform.
are you saying police cams are useless, or that the police are purposefully obstructing justice by blocking the footage. im confused
Your second question solves the first.
Usually the reform doesn’t really fail, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do. The issue is how the reform is made or formulated in the first place.
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Abolish police.
There’s no “reforming” a system that was BUILT this way.
I don’t want to hear it. Find another place to lick boots.
The system in the USA is built this way. There are countries in the world where police officers act professionally and can be trusted.
We don’t want a lawless, free for all place without any law enforcement, we deserve a proper force, trained to behave in a professional manner, and monitored to do so.
You could describe the deep reform needed as “abolish and then build from the ground”, but that’s a matter of how to reach the goal, rather than a change in the goal itself’.
We could start by making the people who are issued government firearms and the ability to stop whoever they want conform to higher standards than random schmucks in the population. We don’t need lower standards when lives and livelihoods are on the line.
Gee I wonder who is out there that will recklessly give excess power to sketchy characters as long as they believe that person will only hurt the “other” people.
The watering down of “Defund the Police” for more palatable public consumption was a travesty.
“Oh no, we’re reasonable! We just want the police to have access to more training and better tools to engage with the public!”
No, we wanted them gone, from the ground up.
It definitely showed just how powerful and overwhelming copaganda is. “Defund the Police” really struck a nerve with the people who hold the power in US society, I think we should keep striking that nerve.
Here the police are viewed as the proverbial ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Every dollar spent on them is evidence of a failure somewhere else in the system.
We still don’t want to remove them though, they still provide that important safety net; any complex system is likely to have errors at some point.
You say it’s boot licking to question you, which in itself is fucking retarded.
But I want to hear your plan.
Say we abolish the police - what next?
Wonder why that is…
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Fuck off with your spam links
Looks like a direct copypaste of another comment down below, from SuperDuper, just to put that link at the end.
There is no such thing as reforming the Police. They are an evil collective of people.
I disagree. Just saw a video on krudplug of a cop shooting a guy right before he can cut up a lady with a butcher knife.
There are crazy, dangerous people in the world. If you can’t fight and you don’t own a gun, you are at the mercy of others to protect you.
I think it’s sad how the vast majority of people who are anti-cop cannot fight and do not own guns. Did they see what happened in CHAZ?
The reasoning you just used was in the form of an anecdote, which undermines your whole point. Anecdotal thinking is one of the most common ways that humans arrive at irrational conclusions.
Why should you care? Well, if you believe what you stated, then you should want other people to believe it too. In order to do this the first step is to learn how to present it without any of the common logical flaws humans are born with.
Your argument pattern is, “Event X happened and I saw it, therefore Y”. No. You need a much larger sample size to make a point. I can’t teach you rational argument in one post, but hopefully you’ll become curious enough to learn. Have a nice day.
Yet most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes. And of course now we have the Internet so now there’s availability bias of all of the extreme cases that go viral. When a study asked how many unarmed blacks were killed by police each year most left leaning were wrong by an order of magnitude.
most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes
Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.
There are some biases inherent to the relevant data. For example, you might be right about this specific situation (police shooting unarmed black people), but what about other instances of violence or misconduct?
We need to consider where data about that comes from. Are we to trust the accuracy of police reports and their own statements as they pertain to misconduct? IA investigations that frequently find no wrongdoing even when it’s plainly obvious that the situation was handled improperly? Or at least could have been avoided? Should we rely upon charges filed against police and their conviction rate?
There’s no official national database for this stuff by the way, and localities almost never produce such metrics willingly, so it’s up to someone to comb through public records. And that, like the case of body cam videos, assumes that police will properly follow FOIA requests.
I’m not suggesting that we assume the absolute worst, but we need to recognize that whatever the data says, the situation is almost definitely worse than that due to these biases.
There are crazy, dangerous people in the world. If you can’t fight and you don’t own a gun, you are at the mercy of others to protect you.
Nothing about this is anecdotal.
You’re right, it’s a broad generalization followed by a fear-based assumption.
That you segued into with an anecdote.
Okay.
What if I’m physically disabled? Which literally everyone is, in relation to a stronger individual or group (and there’s literally always someone/something bigger than you)… Does that mean I don’t have the “right” to be anti-murder, even if the murderer is someone with a badge?
Or maybe there’s a sliding scale, with how much of a position of principle that I’m allowed hold correlating proportionally to how much I can bench or how quickly I can subdue an opponent?
That sounds pretty fascist.
Does that mean I don’t have the “right” to be anti-murder
I’m not going to take your bad-faith arguments seriously. Goodbye.
It’s exaggerated to make a point, not a bad-faith argument. Try reading the rest of the comment, boss…
Your position appears to rest on the idea that people who need protection somehow don’t have the right to hold positions of principle against murdering police that in theory might also protect them in some scenario. Idk, it sounds either fascist, or like you really haven’t thought things through enough…
Sure.
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…isn’t there a way to legally request any video footage? That’s how all those body-cam yt channels get their footage from, by placing requests in. I thought it was a federal law that you can obtain any police cam video.
Depends on your location. Washington has some of the best public records laws in the country. SPD releases all body cam footage when their officers kill someone. Unfortunately it’s deceptively edited and when you request the full footage it takes about 2 years where they tell you every month they’re delaying because of Covid or something.
Police will hide as long as possible and destroy evidence when they can get away with it. SPD has been sued for deleting vehicle footage after public records requests for the footage. Now they just edit the footage to look like there’s nothing to see and hope no one requests the full videos.
Pretty sure that’s USA’s Freedom of information Act.
In ‘news that was incredibly obvious from the start’…no shit sherlock.
