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The technology exists, and is improving each month. I have a family member who is an administrative LEO as is currently tasked with several others to start a pretty exhaustive process to get this rolling. A local town agency plans to implement them in February of this year.

As for cost, you cannot afford not to. In my security gig, constant camera monitoring really eliminates the majority of employee and procedure problems. It took a year or so to condition every one to the culture, but when they know somebody is watching, it is amazing how well everybody behaves and works. It also allows us to be very proactive in dealing with potential problem situations. We will probably be going to a dash mounted option for the delivery and pickup truck as well.

If I still had my commercial vehicles, I with out a bit of hesitation would have active video cameras installed in all of them. Cost is insignificant when compared to the cost of litigation for anything. Video cameras are pretty much standard on commercial construction job sites anymore . I was able to remotely watch every activity going on at job sites 100 miles away.

In the early 1980s, as a young Rescue unit driver, I was called on the carpet for a speed violation ( 75 mph, Code 3 to a traffic accident, 3 trauma victims). Chief called me in the office afterwards and threw down one of those old school round tattle tale ink cards and pointed out my "procedure violation. " I admitted to it, he grinned and told me to go tell everybody that I had got my bubblegum chewed out and the next person who got caught would be written up. That pretty much brought everybody back into " procedure compliance".

AS for having the Federal government being involved with anything local LE agencies do the answer is HELL, NO.
 
I don't know if any of you have seen this video before - it's from August of 2013. An Idaho police officer is wearing a POV camera and is involved in a fatal shooting. It would be curious to have had this tech on the Ferguson officer, perhaps the riots and everything else would never have happened.

Fair warning, this is a somewhat graphic video of a real police shooting:

 
Did the body cam send the local video to the car via wireless or did the Officer have to remove the cam and dock it in the car? Seems any system that relies on turning the body cam on or off or removing from the Officer will be full of user errors as well as plausible excuses as to why the cam didn't record some crucial footage..........
My understanding was that the cam sent the vid to local storage system wirelessly.

Works on the same principle as many of their handheld radios which can go to the car and use it as a "repeater" to connect to their trunked radio systems. That way they get a lot more power from the car radio which can run off the car battery.

When you are close like that, it makes data transmission a lot easier.

However some cam system works now, there is no reason - technically anyway - that it couldn't work seamlessly in a secure fashion.
 
In the early 1980s, as a young Rescue unit driver, I was called on the carpet for a speed violation ( 75 mph, Code 3 to a traffic accident, 3 trauma victims). Chief called me in the office afterwards and threw down one of those old school round tattle tale ink cards and pointed out my "procedure violation. " I admitted to it, he grinned and told me to go tell everybody that I had got my bubblegum chewed out and the next person who got caught would be written up. That pretty much brought everybody back into " procedure compliance".

When I was in the USCG we had a truck that kept blowing engines.

After the second time the GSA put a device in that recorded speed and RPM on a paper disk that we had to change out periodically. We were told to religiously change it and to never exceed 55 MPH and a certain RPM.

I was driving the truck the next time the engine blew.

It protected me because it showed I was obeying the rules.
 
I too was curious about why such a device would have such limited recording capacity - you'd think they could make something with a 64gb SD card that could hold an hour or more easily.

They can. I have a GoPro cam I have used on my dirt bike. The 16GB card in that would record about 2 hrs of 1080P (high-def) vid - with sound - IIRC.

Looking on the GoPro site they list some of their cams as recording 8 hrs of WVGA (800x400) vid on 32 GB cards.

http://gopro.com/support/articles/recording-time-in-each-video-setting

Sixty four GB of SD RAM costs about $32 retail.

That is the sweet spot for retail cost - 128 GB cards are closer to $1 per GB, but I would expect with a volume purchase the price would come down quite a bit to get wholesale prices.

So a vid cam should be able to store 16 hrs of 1080P compressed vid on a 128GB SD card. That should be long enough for even a long shift.

A system could be setup that a LEO picks up his vid cam at the beginning of a shift, it is already running, and drops it off at the end of a shift and it is still running. A custodian of the cams makes sure the cam is working when it goes out and that it downloads vid when it comes back in. That would be a simple straightforward system for most LEO agencies where a vid cam would be employed.
 
It protected me because it showed I was obeying the rules.

Yeah, ours showed I had lights and sirens going on and taking the time back to when I called responding to where the " violation" happened it put me on a straight 3 lane road on a sunny Tuesday morning. We had two trauma saves on that call, so it pretty much got overlooked. That was probably 1982 maybe.
 
A system could be setup that a LEO picks up his vid cam at the beginning of a shift, it is already running, and drops it off at the end of a shift and it is still running. A custodian of the cams makes sure the cam is working when it goes out and that it downloads vid when it comes back in. That would be a simple straightforward system for most LEO agencies where a vid cam would be employed.

I knew you would have the tech side down, exactly what I was thinking too. Chain of custody thing, should just work fine. Look for police unions to put up token protests, but I can pretty much tell you that most police commanders are going to want this big time.

I perform my duties under camera about 3 hours a day, I have no problem with it.
 
I perform my duties under camera about 3 hours a day, I have no problem with it.

And that is the thing right there. Any honest person should see this as a way to help them do there job. It would be a way to collaborate the events, establish a much more defensible case. I would think Law enforcement would be all for it ( the 98% of Law enforcement who are good, honest people anyway)
 
They can. I have a GoPro cam I have used on my dirt bike. The 16GB card in that would record about 2 hrs of 1080P (high-def) vid - with sound - IIRC.

Looking on the GoPro site they list some of their cams as recording 8 hrs of WVGA (800x400) vid on 32 GB cards.

http://gopro.com/support/articles/recording-time-in-each-video-setting

Sixty four GB of SD RAM costs about $32 retail.

That is the sweet spot for retail cost - 128 GB cards are closer to $1 per GB, but I would expect with a volume purchase the price would come down quite a bit to get wholesale prices.

So a vid cam should be able to store 16 hrs of 1080P compressed vid on a 128GB SD card. That should be long enough for even a long shift.

A system could be setup that a LEO picks up his vid cam at the beginning of a shift, it is already running, and drops it off at the end of a shift and it is still running. A custodian of the cams makes sure the cam is working when it goes out and that it downloads vid when it comes back in. That would be a simple straightforward system for most LEO agencies where a vid cam would be employed.

A GoPro would be a nice option - high quality HD video, inexpensive, removable memory media. But perhaps a bit bulky for a wearable camera.

Here is a link to one camera I saw featured, if I recall correctly, for the Ferguson department. Comparing specs to a GoPro, this model is 640x480 and can run for 4 hours continuously at the highest quality setting, up to 13 hours on the lowest quality setting and a battery that can run for 12+ hours.

I don't know, I'm surprised they can't do more storage and higher resolution, considering that technology is already on the market.
 
I wish that 140 lb liquor store owner could've had a body cam on as well. So those perjuring "witnesses" could gaze into the eyes of the poor respectable victim who attacked and robbed him.
 
Yes, and when technology is being developed for and sold to government agencies, we all know what happens to costs then ;)
To be fair, gov. RFPs often have so much crap in them it drives up the cost to meet their specs. Sometimes most of the specs are valid for the application, but sometimes you get a spec where they throw in every mil-spec std. they can think of where something much less would have been fine.

Then there was all the documentation and red tape and crap.

Conversely, I have seen the gov. go for the cheapest crap they can get. I still remember the boots (especially the boots!) and other clothing they gave us in the USCG - many NCOs went out and bought their own because of the poor fit and quality of the gov issue crap.
 
A system could be setup that a LEO picks up his vid cam at the beginning of a shift, it is already running, and drops it off at the end of a shift and it is still running. A custodian of the cams makes sure the cam is working when it goes out and that it downloads vid when it comes back in. That would be a simple straightforward system for most LEO agencies where a vid cam would be employed.

This is where I disagree...

First of all, 12 hours of video is a LOT of video. Secondly, I wouldn't want an FOI on me taking a crap, listening to my phone calls with my wife or eating and randomly cussing out loud (to myself) about every tard I see. The cameras should be turned on and off at the officer's discretion (with a rule in place at each department to turn on the video during all official public encounters)...but there should also be GPS sticks in each car, as well.

Also, as stated earlier, the cameras should not be able to be recorded over or be able to be deleted by the officer.

Most dashboard cams automatically start recording as soon as the emergency lights are activated and are kept in a hard drive in the trunk that cannot be erased or editted by the officer...the issue we had when I was an MP was that nobody was downloading the hard drives or clearing them out- so they wouldn't record after about a five days of recording (because it would be full) and you couldn't record over or delete anything previous...even the shift supervisor didn't have access to them, so they would be pretty useless by the weekend.

Probably the most unknown thing is that the start of body cameras and recording of police officers has actually been from the police officer's, themselves. Officers have been purchasing recording devices on their own for years (even I still have my original voice recorder) to defend their actions in court...but many departments have forbidden their use (even here in prison I cannot bring in my personal recorder, because it's an "unapproved electronic device").
 
I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that in order to have any evidentiary value in a court proceeding, there would need to be some sort of safeguard that prevents the police from selectively turning them on and off or editing the recordings. Basically, in the event of a shooting they would become a piece of evidence and subject to the same chain-of-custody procedures as other evidence.

As far as the recording time goes...I'm also not a tech geek but my beat up, plain-Jane, 3 year-old iPhone 4 has the memory capacity to record at least a couple of hours of video and that is with it also being a phone and an app-running device. A modern, comparably sized, single-purpose bodycam would almost certainly have the capacity to store many tens of hours of video and would have no need to record over itself or be limited to short bursts.

This already happens with the dash cams. Secure storage, can't be edited by cops, some of the systems upload digitally in real time.

Cop saved from sexual assault claim by bodycam.
http://www.policeone.com/police-pro...utes-sexual-assault-claim-against-NM-officer/
 
In the case of the most recent shooting near Ferguson, the dash cam was not on because the lights were not activated.

If a LEO doesn't want the cam recording his time in a restroom, then he can just take it off. Problem solved.

If a LEO has the option of turning it off, then you can bet the bad ones will and claim it was an accident or malfunction, and that defeats the purpose.
 
In the case of the most recent shooting near Ferguson, the dash cam was not on because the lights were not activated.

If a LEO doesn't want the cam recording his time in a restroom, then he can just take it off. Problem solved.

If a LEO has the option of turning it off, then you can bet the bad ones will and claim it was an accident or malfunction, and that defeats the purpose.

Agreed, but it shows a pattern...there is no real good answer. If I was a bad cop and got into a bad shoot wouldn't I just say someone took the thing? Then what? Sew the thing to their uniform on not give the guy any privacy?

Even I know that is rediculous...
 
If they were in a patrol car and/or near it, then the car can easily be setup to stream the vid from the body cam real time to storage - so throwing it away afterwards wouldn't help. Plus, the cam would probably be found. Plus there would be a dash cam too.

LEOs on a foot beat or on a bicycle or horse would be a different situation naturally. The bicycle or horse could be rigged to have storage. On foot they are usually downtown, you might be able to stream live via other means.

LEOs need to realize, and most probably do, that the cam protects them as much or more as it protects non-LEOs.
 
If they were in a patrol car and/or near it, then the car can easily be setup to stream the vid from the body cam real time to storage - so throwing it away afterwards wouldn't help. Plus, the cam would probably be found. Plus there would be a dash cam too.

LEOs on a foot beat or on a bicycle or horse would be a different situation naturally. The bicycle or horse could be rigged to have storage. On foot they are usually downtown, you might be able to stream live via other means.

LEOs need to realize, and most probably do, that the cam protects them as much or more as it protects non-LEOs.

And if I chase someone (on foot) away from my car or bike? I guess you don't see cops going into houses or running in dark alleys anytime soon.
 
And if I chase someone (on foot) away from my car or bike? I guess you don't see cops going into houses or running in dark alleys anytime soon.
You would, most of the time, be close enough for the transmission of the data to work. The main concern there would be less about distance and more about what is between you and your vehicle.

When you get back to the vehicle or near another LEO vehicle, the transmission would resume and pickup from where it was interrupted - meanwhile the vid is buffered in local storage. The LEO wouldn't know when the cam was still streaming to storage or was only storing locally - there would be no reason for the LEO to know that.

This isn't rocket science (FWIW - this is the kind of problem I have been paid to work on for almost 30 years) - there are well known methodologies to solve these kinds of problems.

The point is that body and vehicle cams for LEOs are indeed a good idea, and while there is no perfect solution, most of the problems can be solved or worked around.

Nothing is perfect though - you just do the best you can.
 

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