The 103rd Precinct will be part of the new NYPD pilot program to test the use of body cameras on police officers. Six precincts throughout the five boroughs are part of this system. Their selection was determined by which precincts had the highest number of stop and frisks.
Nine officers in the 103rd Precinct will be part of the program. There will be one camera per officer per squad to start out. There are three squads per shift in the precinct and, depending on the time, there will always be at least one cop with a body camera on patrol and as many as three depending on patrol schedules.
“I think cameras are a good thing,” said one officer from the precinct. “It’s a great idea and gives a different perspective of what is actually happening out there.”
The cameras are hands free, one on the torso and one over the ear. The officer will have to pull down the shutter covering the lens to turn the camera on whenever he or she is making a stop or arrest.
17 comments:
I think civilians should have body cameras to record the police!
I cant wait until these cameras show the crap cops deal with every day and shows the way people really act towards police.
I second the second comment. I think this will give a perspective that most do not see, what police officers have to deal with on a daily basis. Many times when we see these civilian videos, they normally do not show what happened before the "confrontation".
And they are staring it in my hood of Jamaica, where there is always plenty of crap and nonsense.
The 103rd??
I can't wait to see the shoplifter chases down Jamaica Ave. and the chained pit bulls barking behind front yard fences.
How about starting in the 73rd in East NY and Brownsville.
This is clearly a waste of money.
From what I've read, the real costs of this program is not the hardware of the cameras but the costs involved in the storage of the imagery.
Will this imagery be public information? Available on request? Through Freedom of Information requests?
The police should also install cameras in the front desk area of police precincts all over the city to monitor how good or bad is the service and the attitude towards citizens requiring assistance. Most front desk officers are rude and dismissive when someone approaches them to ask for help, information or assistance.
Interesting question, George.
I did a liberal back of the envelope calculation (3200 megabytes of video for an 8-hour shift, for 35K officers), which would cost just under $4.4 million per year under low-access storage with Amazon, which can deliver any data in 3-5 hours. Given the bulk needed, they might even be able to undercut that. Of course, this cost mounts (ie by the end of the second year, it will be $8.8 million, 3rd year, $13.2 million, etc.) After 50 years (assuming no breakthroughs in data storage capacity) this would cost $220 million. If the city would simply retire data that old (there are expiries for certain record types), it would probably be a manageable cost. Also, again, I deliberately overestimated some values, which could lower this cost at least an order of magnitude taken together.
Given the way I've seen NYC tech work though, I'd expect it to be at least 2 orders of magnitude more expensive.
As for the accessibility of these records under Freedom of Information, I have no idea. It would depend on how these records were used. It's possible that since the footage consists of public servants on official public duty that it might override non-responsive exemptions, but I really don't know.
Jon Torodash:
The cameras have to be activated by the officers don't they? They don't run continuously. So you don't need nearly that much storage space.
There are privacy concerns with the videos, they shouldn't be made available to just anyone who asks. If you aren't in the video you should have a damn hard time getting the footage, and the city shouldn't keep it around unless it is being used in an active case. Keeping it for a year in general seems sufficient. If there is some reason to keep it longer - if it's going to be used as evidence that someone resisted arrest, or if it's requested by someone in the video as evidence of police abuse it would be easy enough to hold onto it longer, say until the case and all appeals play out.
You'll probably spend much more money hiring people to review the footage and see whether or not it's okay to release to the person requesting it than actually storing the data.
The cameras have to be activated by the officers don't they? They don't run continuously. So you don't need nearly that much storage space.
Not necessarily, and it could be part of NYPD procedure to have it running while they're on the street. If there were some type of deactivation dock they could use at precincts, courts, etc. wherever there were already cameras, it could cut down on the time. But I made my estimation for continuous running on the full shift.
There are privacy concerns with the videos, they shouldn't be made available to just anyone who asks. If you aren't in the video you should have a damn hard time getting the footage, and the city shouldn't keep it around unless it is being used in an active case. Keeping it for a year in general seems sufficient. If there is some reason to keep it longer - if it's going to be used as evidence that someone resisted arrest, or if it's requested by someone in the video as evidence of police abuse it would be easy enough to hold onto it longer, say until the case and all appeals play out.
Debatable if the officers are in public. If they're in a private dwelling, you're probably right. Record storage times may be determined at the state level. I don't know; I'm not a lawyer.
You'll probably spend much more money hiring people to review the footage and see whether or not it's okay to release to the person requesting it than actually storing the data.
That is indeed how Freedom of Information works: you have to pay for much of the work spent on record preparation. The high profile incidents as of late appear to have taken place over a matter of minutes. Tagging these video files with the date, officer name, and start/end times would be trivial, so zeroing in on the critical moments shouldn't be too laborious. And just because it isn't suitable for public copies doesn't mean it couldn't be tremendously useful for trials. The main question though is whether this system is cost prohibitive for the potential benefits it could bring. I don't see the technology as being insurmountable.
This will be a great program for showing the very very tough job it is being a police officer and hopefully now they won't have to scare us by saying they won't be coming to our assistance if we complain about them. Their jobs are very very difficult and this seems to make some of them very upset, to the point of madness. Now the Blue Wall of Silence will no longer be necessary. Good Cops won't have to hide Bad Cops any more! Hooray!
From the linked article.
The cameras are hands free, one on the torso and one over the ear. The officer will have to pull down the shutter covering the lens to turn the camera on whenever he or she is making a stop or arrest.
there have been incidents where cops would cover their names or their badge numbers to evade identification if they are abusive during protests.why wouldn't they do the same by not turning it on or marking the lens with a sharpie.
this is a complete waste of money indeed,and that goes for this nonsense of the cost of retraining officers.the only training these officers need is to give them the little book containing the U.S. Constitution and have them study it.it's available from the rand corporation and free online
http://store.infowars.com/The-US-Constitution-Book-Just-For-Kids_p_712.html
and has the eric garner video proved,the cops don't care if you're filming them and the grand jury has given them more impunity.the objective is to scare people from breaking arbitrary anachronistic laws,establishing authoritative control,falsely thinking that it will reduce crime.well, broken windows pussy crime offenses.
the blue wall will never be dismantled at this rate,too much corruption and graft to do anything in this town.don't entirely blame the cops,this shit starts from the top and the offices of city hall and city council.and it trickles down to jaded cops and a jaded citizenry
you want to truly stop this,write a law banning cynicism.
A camera filmed eric garner get murdered, and the minutes afterwards where not one first responder (even EMTs) tried to revive him or give him oxygen. Cameras aren't the problem: inaction and a complete disrespect for citizens is.
The cameras will probably make everyone behave a little better, but if absolutely no one is held accountable there is no point.
There are some great cops out there and there are some serious idiots and others who are too terrified to be given such a stressful job. Hiring standards need to be far stricter, and idiots like Pantaleo should be fired, without pension or benefits (just for waving to the camera afterwards as if killing someone is something to be proud of or goof off about). There's absolutely no way that behaving like that for all the world to see right after killing someone is 'professional' on any level.
If he stays on the job, absolutely nothing is going to get better with police-community relations, and when this happens again, there won't be fairly harmless protests. Things will get bad.
The cameras showed exactly what they should have: Garner was getting belligerent with cops who were trying to take him in. Pantaleo overreacted and a tragic accident resulted. He'll be confined to a desk job, kicked off the force, or sent to a beat no one else wants to go. He's incompetent, and he'll probably lose a heavy lawsuit. But this was not racism (did you notice female black Sergent Adoni in a brief frame of the video? Her testimony that Garner did not appear to be danger at the time was in the grand jury case) and he was not tackled for the cigarettes. When the cops take you in, you don't get mouthy, gesticulate, and resist - you comply and file charges later.
Remember when everyone would claim to see ufo's back in the 80's?? Now everyone has cameras readily available and not one ufo sighting. Watch all the complaints against police drop once they have cameras to disprove the allegations. I would put my life savings on the line to have a camera taping everytime I had a civilian complaint. I know there are bad cops but I see good cops all the get complaints against them. Imagine if students could fill out a complaint against their teacher everytime they got a bad grade, knowing that complaint is gonna have a negative impact regardless of how valid it is.
In addition since this is tax money and everyone always claims that they have a right to this and that, let's post the videos of people in public online showing how bad they act in public. Freedom of information, right?
The reason people are resisting more is because going through the system is a fiasco. Garner keeps saying early on 'i'm not doing this today' - which may have been 'i'm not going to willingly let you guys put me through the system for 12-48 hours away from my family, work and life just because I *maybe* was selling loose cigerettes'.
The time just doesn't fit the quality of life crimes that people are jailed for these days. I suspect this is due in part by the quota (or should we call it performance standard?). Where a ticket would make total sense, instead people are getting thrown through the system. Most of us working poor can't afford 12-48 hours in jail waiting to see the judge. If I disappear from work for 48 hours, I'm getting fired.
Part of why this gets framed as racism is the huge amount of stop and frisk in black areas compared to white areas. I bet officers could make MORE collars doing stop and frisk in white neighborhoods.
A friend of mine got run through the system for absolutely no reason nearly 2 years ago. he's an average white guy. The court case took nearly 2 years, and during that time he has been suspended from his job with no pay. Yeah he'll probably win restitution but that will probably be another year or two from now. Can you see why someone might resist arrest these days? Who the fuck wants to spend 2-3 years dealing with this crap - potentially having your job lost, strain on relationship, etc - especially over something as ridiculous as selling someone a loosy for a quarter?
This whole thing is a hot steaming pile of shit, and I envy no one that has to deal with it all the time. The only thing I'm surprised at is how relatively calm protests around here have been. if what happened with garner happened in someplace like Detroit, the natives would firebomb everything.
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