On a related note - we've consulted with LAPD a few times recently on their video system for squad cars - under CA law, I believe they have to retain video / audio from the cars for something like 5-7 years. They store locally at each precinct and then the video is uploaded automatically on a cycle up to a central storage facility via the city's network -- they were going to need a huge amount of disk space in just a couple years to hold all of this.

Absolutely. Some more progressive police agencies look for a customer service ethic. Instead of a body building hobby, they look for past volunteer work and activity in community organizations, etc.

A waiter or waitress develops skill in quickly meeting and sizing up a vatiety of people, and pleasing them. Sales team recruiters work resturants. Thes skills are much more important for a cop than shooting ot wrestling ability. It's good training.

A guy who enjoyed his pizza job in college probably has excellent human relations skills.

And this kind of job interview gets rid of the macho cops that the agency wants to avoid. Those guys don't like thes kinds of questions and won't respond well.

Yeah, but we're not set up that way for the most part in MN.

Not an option. With secrecy comes corruption, especially in such an unmitigated position of power.

Cell-phones would only allow them to circumvent the accountability that would be mandated under a total transparency situation. Every conversation had while wearing the badge ought to be as accessable to us, the average citizen, as it is the entire justice system.

It pisses me off that I cannot access a police report about an incident that happened to me or on my land unless I pay a lawyer to get for me. Unacceptable.

The sensitivity of information is of little concern to me; a police officer berating my friend in a bar parking lot because he has something about HAM radio operators, another offcer stopping the same friend on 35E just south of the river and going into a similar tirade...

Yeah... if these thugs had their cameras going, if they were on duty, if they'd actually called in that they were going to approach my friend for their made up reasons or if they filed a report about the interaction afterwards, it would still be at least a years worth of red tape and intimidation before they would produce the public documents.

Unfortunately, I doubt they were acting officially. I strongly doubt it. I'm willing to bet the only record is in the memories of the parties involved.

That wouldn't be the case with a forced transparency mandate.

I'm sorry - there are elements of this that just aren't practical.

So some real life examples. Note - I worked in really small town Indiana - we had very few resources.

1) 1993 or so - we had a double homicide in the county. Neighbor found the bodies - they had been dead a couple days. If we had revealed the identifies over the radio - the families would likely have found out before we had a chance to notify the family officially. There was no radio communication about the deaths at all.

Notification to the medical examiner, the calls out for additional officers, request to the state police for evidence techs + detectives, and other communications were strictly via telephone.

I can cite numerous examples of this being the case with traffic accidents, etc.

2) Large party with underage drinking in remote part of the county. Getting officers assembled for this was handled entirely off-radio.

Why? Because as soon as we put it on the radio, the party would have been over - folks would have scattered before officers were anywhere close.

---

If you want to make some of these conversations public after the fact / after the investigation is closed, I have no issue with that. But some things need to remain confidential for a period of time - often quite brief.

Nope, ALL of the conversations; and it's something that could be done after a predetermined delay-as I said in my original post, but in no way could the ammount of time nor could the decision for disclosure be made by the agency. Unacceptable. This also goes for "off radio" comments. Wire these officers with microphones so that there's no possibility of intimidation or thuggery.

This.

More citizens should wear wires, too. Not just recorders that can be seized, but some sort of wireless uplink.

Get a critical mass of this, and a greater respect might well ensue.

There was a case of a guy in Missouri, I believe, that wired his car for video uplink, and caught the cop that was abusing him.

I do think that the security cams they have placed all around the city should be public data. They are gathering info on public places, after all. Each station has the desk officer looking at them, and the 911 operations center has some as well. This should be uplinked live to the web, and citizens actively enlisted to help monitor it. Add a chat room connection to 911, and you get free public service performed by volunteers!

They are under MN Law -- if you goto the 1st Precinct in Minneapolis, for example, you can view video from the SafeZone cameras - including archive video - by using a kiosk in the lobby.

I do like the idea of having the public help monitor the cameras...
B

The stuff I use the most with people I learned at training for water softener sales. Really.


As for the rest of this topic,

none of you would put up with the shit you think cops should.

You want to record me while I'm pissing in the urinal, fine.
You want to uplink the audio of me tellling mom that her 6 month old is dead, and listen while she sobs in front of me, fine.
You want to record and release the id of my gang or drug informant who called me on the sly, you can pay for his funeral or medical costs. Fine, I guess.
You want....

You get my point.

I understand that once you've been burned, all fire is suspect. I'm sorry you feel that way.

Hasn't nearly all of the prototype work been done on Robocop so that all of this discussion could be rendered moot?

The answer is to get the right people into police work in the first place, and not the wrong people.

tman065's signature line says it all, I think.

Then, once we get them hired, treat them right so they can stay emotionally heathy. We don't want insecure or cynical burnouts after jsut a few years.

To build upon tman's point, it is my experience (admittedly in areas other than law enforcement) that using technological surveillance does not, over the long term, improve the quality of work. People find creative ways to circumvent constant surveillance, and the best people, the most libertarian people, the freedom-loving people who would we would really like to have become cops, won't put up with it and will go in to other lines of work.

I think that pay is a large part of the problem. Local law enforcement doesn't pay well. The fact that there was a large surge of local LE joining up with the TSA and the air marshals program when those were started, because of the better pay speaks volumes. Those aren't high paying jobs.

The criminalization of large swaths of society through drug and alcohol policies doesn't help, either.

Absolute truth.
Now lets talk about the virtues of Guantanamo and the (un)PATRIOT Act. After all, public trials, evidence that exists, habeus corpus, and due process are only for the less-guilty people.

Government should never be in secret.
Enforcement sould never be in secret.
Judgement should never be in secret.

Any individual who stands for a free nation will easily understand the value and import of this concept.

Binky is dead right on this one. You punch in for public sevice, we hit the record button, and then there's terabytes of HD space soaking up the glory. When it's time to go home, the stop key gets pressed, and you get all the privacy of any other citizen.