• America's largest police union wants Trump to reverse bush-era ban on racial profiling
    16 replies, posted
[URL="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/heres-what-biggest-police-union-wants-trump-his-first-100-days"]Mother Jones[/URL] [URL="https://fop.net/CmsDocument/Doc/TrumpFirst100Days.pdf"]Document in question[/URL] [QUOTE]Donald Trump didn't earn too many endorsements from unions during his presidential campaign, but one enthusiastically supported him. The national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which boasts more than 330,000 members and is the country's largest police union, announced in September that it would be backing Trump because he "understands and supports" its priorities. (The organization declined to make a formal endorsement in the 2012 presidential election but in 2008 backed John McCain.) Trump's rhetoric on safety and law and order seemed to align with the right-leaning union. "Our members believe he will make America safe again," the group explained when it announced its support. About a week after Election Day, it offered the president-elect a list of its priorities for the first 100 days of his administration. The policy ideas, released through the union's official website with little fanfare, includes more than a dozen proposals. Many involve aggressively dismantling the modest reforms suggested by the Obama administration in a 2015 plan called President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, such as increasing the use of body cameras nationwide and implementing a national database on police use of force. The FOP also wants Trump to bring back racial profiling in federal agencies by lifting or changing the 2003 ban put in place by the Bush administration. The union suggests he should cut off some or all federal aid to "sanctuary cities" and bring an end to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), using its database to deport the individuals who had been protected by being included in it. Using police officers to participate in the deportation of undocumented immigrants was an idea Trump suggested in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Arizona, last August. Several large cities have indicated they will not use police officers or relinquish their status as sanctuary cities to help deport immigrants. [/QUOTE] For what it's worth, they also asked trump to direct law enforcement not to persue federal drug law violations in states that have passed marijuana legalization and they support medical marijuana research. So it's not all bad.
There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.
every special interest group is crawling towards the swamp these days
So basically, they're asking to be given free reign with no accountability.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;51551754]There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.[/QUOTE] Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Everything police record has to be preserved. This creates a few issues. 1.) Storage. Audio is easily compressed and massive amounts of it can be stored with limited issue. Video, like that from cruiser dash cams, already tests the limits of some agencies to effectively store data. Video from a larger agency could easily start taking up cost prohibitive amounts of storage. Keeping in mind that this storage is not just some hard drive somewhere, but has to be securely contained and kept in redundant storage locations. 2.) Synchronizing the data. Police body cams generally function similarly to cruiser cams. They don't always save everything they see. In the case of a cruiser cam, they generally only start actually saving data once the lights are employed. At the conclusion of which, the officer then needs to assign a case number to the footage and it has to be uploaded and archived at the end of his or her shift. Body cams would need to do the same thing, but that unfortunately means the officer needs to not only always remember to turn on their body cam, but also remember to assign the case number of the cam at the end of the engagement. A minor nuisance, to be sure, but officers deal with bad stuff on a regular basis, and things do get forgotten in the heat of the moment. All this data then needs to be tightly packed with the associated dash cam footage and the body cam footage of every officer on scene. That means you could have footage from 20 sources from a simple felony stop. 10 officers and 10 cruisers responding. 3.) This one is really the most damning, unfortunately: Police are often present during the worst days of someone's life. They confront victims immediately after they've been assaulted or raped. They are there delivering the news of the death of a close loved one. They are there investigating while the family stares at the ashes of what was their home the night before. All of it gets recorded and archived. That archive is now open to freedom of information act requests. Anyone can request information. How do you then handle that request? Technically speaking people in the street have no right or expectation of privacy, and the department has no real legal ground if an investigation is concluded, to deny access to information. Adding to that is the fact that someone has to review the footage. You have people who would need to be tasked with reviewing the archive footage before releasing it. Body cams can be an invaluable tool, but there are legitimate reasons to oppose them as well. That said, the FOP can get fucked.
[QUOTE=GunFox;51551817]Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Everything police record has to be preserved. This creates a few issues. 1.) Storage. Audio is easily compressed and massive amounts of it can be stored with limited issue. Video, like that from cruiser dash cams, already tests the limits of some agencies to effectively store data. Video from a larger agency could easily start taking up cost prohibitive amounts of storage. Keeping in mind that this storage is not just some hard drive somewhere, but has to be securely contained and kept in redundant storage locations. 2.) Synchronizing the data. Police body cams generally function similarly to cruiser cams. They don't always save everything they see. In the case of a cruiser cam, they generally only start actually saving data once the lights are employed. At the conclusion of which, the officer then needs to assign a case number to the footage and it has to be uploaded and archived at the end of his or her shift. Body cams would need to do the same thing, but that unfortunately means the officer needs to not only always remember to turn on their body cam, but also remember to assign the case number of the cam at the end of the engagement. A minor nuisance, to be sure, but officers deal with bad stuff on a regular basis, and things do get forgotten in the heat of the moment. All this data then needs to be tightly packed with the associated dash cam footage and the body cam footage of every officer on scene. That means you could have footage from 20 sources from a simple felony stop. 10 officers and 10 cruisers responding. 3.) This one is really the most damning, unfortunately: Police are often present during the worst days of someone's life. They confront victims immediately after they've been assaulted or raped. They are there delivering the news of the death of a close loved one. They are there investigating while the family stares at the ashes of what was their home the night before. All of it gets recorded and archived. That archive is now open to freedom of information act requests. Anyone can request information. How do you then handle that request? Technically speaking people in the street have no right or expectation of privacy, and the department has no real legal ground if an investigation is concluded, to deny access to information. Adding to that is the fact that someone has to review the footage. You have people who would need to be tasked with reviewing the archive footage before releasing it. Body cams can be an invaluable tool, [B]but there are legitimate reasons to oppose them as well[/B][/QUOTE] I mean... None of those really seem like reasons to oppose them, just things we have to eventually work on to make it a better process.
[QUOTE=jonu67;51551866]I mean... None of those really seem like reasons to oppose them, just things we have to eventually work on to make it a better process.[/QUOTE] Fair enough. The issue right now is one of policy and simple financial limitations. Body cams are expensive to implement and don't yet offer adequate protections to victims.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;51551754]There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.[/QUOTE] And bystanders, and everyone, and truth, and accountability, and ...
Drain the swamp, fill the swamp with even swampier swamp, and fill the reservoirs with swamp.
[QUOTE=GunFox;51551890]Fair enough. The issue right now is one of policy and simple financial limitations. Body cams are expensive to implement and don't yet offer adequate protections to victims.[/QUOTE] body cams suck because the government buys them. no joke. government contracts lead to extremely sub-standard products that companies can charge 10x for because the gov doesn't really know how technology works. So, how do we know that they're being ripped off? Well, let's look at the cost breakdown: Amazon GovCloud storage runs at about $30/TB ([URL="https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/"]$0.03 per gig[/URL]), with 720p video from YouTube running at ~0.25 megabytes per second, which is ~900 megabytes per hour of video (or 1 Gb for simplicity) which means that we get a raw cost of storage of a working day (8hr) of video for $0.27. Bakersfield, CA has 200 officers, which means that if they're all working 8 hr days every day (they don't) we get a total cost of $1,440 for storage cost per month. Bakersfield PD is claiming that it's going to cost them.... [URL="http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Police-Body-Cam-Installation.html"]$20,000 a month [/URL]just for video storage?! Even if we double the storage cost by assuming they're recording 1080p (the cameras only offer 720 and 1080), and then assume twice the amount of officers, we still only reach $6,000. That means that they're getting charged an additional $14,000 for IT overhead, or some dude who's copying the data from a SD card, or something.
[QUOTE=Foda;51552168]body cams suck because the government buys them. no joke. government contracts lead to extremely sub-standard products that companies can charge 10x for because the gov doesn't really know how technology works. So, how do we know that they're being ripped off? Well, let's look at the cost breakdown: Amazon GovCloud storage runs at about $30/TB ([URL="https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/"]$0.03 per gig[/URL]), with 720p video from YouTube running at ~0.25 megabytes per second, which is ~900 megabytes per hour of video (or 1 Gb for simplicity) which means that we get a raw cost of storage of a working day (8hr) of video for $0.27. Bakersfield, CA has 200 officers, which means that if they're all working 8 hr days every day (they don't) we get a total cost of $1,440 for storage cost per month. Bakersfield PD is claiming that it's going to cost them.... [URL="http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Police-Body-Cam-Installation.html"]$20,000 a month [/URL]just for video storage?! Even if we double the storage cost by assuming they're recording 1080p (the cameras only offer 720 and 1080), and then assume twice the amount of officers, we still only reach $6,000. That means that they're getting charged an additional $14,000 for IT overhead, or some dude who's copying the data from a SD card, or something.[/QUOTE] That's a completely bogus analysis. Law enforcement agencies bound by FOIA handling restrictions can't just run their raw video through a Youtube compression algorithm and throw it up on an Amazon cloud. Read [url=http://www.computerworld.com/article/2979627/cloud-storage/as-police-move-to-adopt-body-cams-storage-costs-set-to-skyrocket.html]this article[/url] about how much it actually costs: [quote] In Birmingham, for instance, the the video cameras themselves cost about $180,000, but the department's total outlay for a five-year contract with Taser will be $889,000. That's because the pact not only includes a hardware replacement warranty, but the necessary cloud storage and file management service to deal with terabytes of content the cameras are producing. The Birmingham police initially purchased 5TB of online storage on Evidence.com, Taser's file management cloud, which is built on Amazon's Web Service (AWS) platform. In just two months, however, the department has already used 1.5TB of its allotment -- and it's on track to exceed the 5TB limit in about six months. "That's the biggest problem with this system...the cost of the storage," Brewer said. "They do offer unlimited storage, but it's quite costly -- well above $1 million for the package we had looked at." Traditionally, police departments saved dash camera footage and other videos on CDs stored away in an evidence room or on an onsite server. But with the increasing use of body cameras, dashboard cams and cameras within the police department itself, the amount of video content now being generated is far more difficult to manage locally. [/quote] Birmingham had, at the time the article was written, 319 body cameras in active use. Just running the numbers, that 5-year contract costs the department about $12k in storage costs [i]alone[/i], to say nothing of the costs of hardware replacement, IT overhead, legal compliance (you basically need a dedicated FOIA person or two to handle that whole aspect), procurement expenses, or any of the other costs that go into it. I'm all for bodycams but there are literally thousands of articles on the Internet explaining how and why they're extremely expensive to implement, so a speculative analysis doesn't prove anything. [editline]19th December 2016[/editline] Oh yeah, and if you actually read [i]how[/i] Bakersfield was spending $20k/mo, it's right there in the article you linked: [quote]The storage of data for those cameras costs even more. Carruesco said it would cost about $100 a month in storage costs for each camera. With 200 cameras, that adds up to $20,000 a month — or $240,000 a year — in storage costs. Between the purchasing and storage costs, the BPD would be spending about $440,000 in its first year of using body-cameras, plus an additional $240,000 every year afterward.[/quote] Services provided by companies like Taser generally start at $60-ish per month per user for the bare minimum of storage, so $100/mo per user is not an unusual cost to have a reasonable storage capacity. This stuff does [i]not[/i] come cheap and it isn't because 'the gov doesn't really know how technology works'.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;51551754]There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.[/QUOTE] They protect [I]good[/I] officers. Obviously no self-respecting shit-for-brains power abusing cop would want his actions recorded for the record.
[QUOTE=GunFox;51551817]Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Everything police record has to be preserved. This creates a few issues. 1.) Storage. *snip* 2.) Synchronizing the data. *snip* 3.) *snip*now open to freedom of information act requests. Anyone can request information. *snip* Body cams can be an invaluable tool, but there are legitimate reasons to oppose them as well. That said, the FOP can get fucked.[/QUOTE] 1) Seems overpriced as mentioned earlier - should be fairly cheap given the existence of services like backblaze. 2) It is naive of me: but if a report mentions who was there from x->y time, wouldn't footage that has (hopefully) included a time stamp essentially come up without any manual intervention? e.g. A stop with those 10 officers, the dash and body cam footage can be recalled by when it was recorded, and thus correlate with a report that included the start / stop time of the footage. 3) Completely agree. These body cams should not be FOIA supported for the reasons you listed. Only within a courtroom should those videos be visible for a jury / as evidence. Overall, I feel like saying throwing out body cams for those reasons is overkill. From my naive perspective issues like these can be resolved without losing the big benefit of these bodycams / other sources of footage.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;51551754]There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.[/QUOTE] Privacy concerns, officer discretion, and lack of funding for both cameras and the server banks to process and store thousands of hours of footage. For example, you can FOIA body camera tapes. That can be used to do anything from studying an officer's schedule to potentially hunting down witnesses by searching the tapes of officers that responded to an incident and taking note of who talked to them at the scene. Officer discretion goes out the window if, say department policy is arrest anyone with drugs, but an officer prefers to just confiscate and destroy small amounts of weed instead of arresting the user and setting him up with a criminal record. The funding issue is self-explanatory.
[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;51551754]There is no legitimate reason to oppose the use of body cameras. They protect officers AND suspects.[/QUOTE] That support ends when you realistically cannot afford them.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;51554422]Privacy concerns, officer discretion, and lack of funding for both cameras and the server banks to process and store thousands of hours of footage. For example, you can FOIA body camera tapes. That can be used to do anything from studying an officer's schedule to potentially hunting down witnesses by searching the tapes of officers that responded to an incident and taking note of who talked to them at the scene. Officer discretion goes out the window if, say department policy is arrest anyone with drugs, but an officer prefers to just confiscate and destroy small amounts of weed instead of arresting the user and setting him up with a criminal record. The funding issue is self-explanatory.[/QUOTE] i'd rather spend money on body cameras and storage than building another prison to house all the manditory sentenced prisoners
[QUOTE=catbarf;51552285]That's a completely bogus analysis. Law enforcement agencies bound by FOIA handling restrictions can't just run their raw video through a Youtube compression algorithm and throw it up on an Amazon cloud. Read [URL="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2979627/cloud-storage/as-police-move-to-adopt-body-cams-storage-costs-set-to-skyrocket.html"]this article[/URL] about how much it actually costs: Birmingham had, at the time the article was written, 319 body cameras in active use. Just running the numbers, that 5-year contract costs the department about $12k in storage costs [I]alone[/I], to say nothing of the costs of hardware replacement, IT overhead, legal compliance (you basically need a dedicated FOIA person or two to handle that whole aspect), procurement expenses, or any of the other costs that go into it. I'm all for bodycams but there are literally thousands of articles on the Internet explaining how and why they're extremely expensive to implement, so a speculative analysis doesn't prove anything. [editline]19th December 2016[/editline] Oh yeah, and if you actually read [I]how[/I] Bakersfield was spending $20k/mo, it's right there in the article you linked: Services provided by companies like Taser generally start at $60-ish per month per user for the bare minimum of storage, so $100/mo per user is not an unusual cost to have a reasonable storage capacity. This stuff does [I]not[/I] come cheap and it isn't because 'the gov doesn't really know how technology works'.[/QUOTE] Read what I wrote. GovCloud is [I]specifically [/I]built for this kinda of thing -- Taser is using Amazon already! It meets the requirements for ITAR, FedRAMP, and DoD levels 2 and 4, which are more than enough for storing the footage. The 20K in storage costs are not taking IT overhead into account, or FOIA, or hardware, so what's the 20K going to? It's my money, so I want a specific breakdown of that cost. Are they just writing someone a check? [URL="http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/09/09/are-the-cops-being-cheated-on-cloud-costs/"]I'm not [/URL]the only one who is suspicious of this pricing, and it's not rocket science to figure out that [URL="http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/11/11652906/official-police-business-taser-lobbying-body-cam"]Taser is heavily lobbying [/URL]to get PDs to use their service.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.