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A whistleblower in Albuquerque, NM, has revealed all the nasty stuff done with SD cards and reports when it comes to body cameras. I don’t think this will surprise anyone in the least, but it does point to a big problem with body cameras: cops have control of them. If they are going to work in the way intended, cops, no matter how high up the chain, cannot be allowed control of them in any way. If not, it’s the same old problem of what the cops say goes.
The Albuquerque Police Department is coming under fire after former records supervisor, Reynaldo Chavez, gave a sworn affidavit claiming officers altered and deleted body camera videos.
According to New Mexico In Depth, after at least two police shootings, videos were deleted or edited so they didn’t show the incident.
[…]
He also said that video cards were easy to take or conveniently lose. He heard Assistant Chief Robert Huntsman confess “we can make this disappear” discussing the body camera videos that were on the SD cards.
The disappearances weren’t unique to patrol officers. Chavez revealed that officers in multiple divisions, including specialized units, were all told not to write reports until there was a review of the body camera videos. If the videos didn’t contain anything concerning, the officers could write up the report on what was recorded. If images were considered “problematic,” officers were told not to mention the recording in the report, write “the recording equipment had malfunctioned” or say that the officer failed to turn on the body camera.
If there were reports that detailed what occurred in the recording, “the video would be altered or corrupted if it was damaging to the police department,” Chavez said.
Full story here.
A whistleblower in Albuquerque, NM, has revealed all the nasty stuff done with SD cards and reports when it comes to body cameras. I don’t think this will surprise anyone in the least, but it does point to a big problem with body cameras: cops have control of them.
One of my best bits of design work was some consulting I did for Taser back in 2009. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the makers of cop cams have already thought of that problem; the original system design Taser was working on streamed the video to a cloud service in an armored vault -- where nobody could tamper with it. The video-streams were to be checksummed with cryptographic hash-chains that would be published in a daily advertisement in national newspaper (hard to retroactively alter that) and all vault accesses were going to be carefully logged and require subpoenas, warrants, etc, where appropriate. There weren’t going to be SD cards or removable memory in the devices; I came up with a clever trick whereby the device would use the available power when it was plugged in to charge, to generate cryptographic data-blocks that could be used to Xor the streams as they were transmitted -- high quality crypto without draining the battery running the CPU hard! -- I think they may have filed for some patents on that… Anyhow, you can imagine what happened: the cops didn’t want it. They didn’t buy the argument that tamper-proof secure cloud streams would serve to protect cops against false accusations.
Because, apparently, the vast majority of accusations against cops aren’t false.
It’s that simple.
The purpose isn’t to protect cops against false accusations, and it never has been. They simply don’t need any additional protection on that score, regardless of what the proportion of real to false accusations is.
Short sighted as always. In the event of police misconduct, when the police say “the camera malfunctioned,” a good lawyer should be able to demolish them entirely. It just spreads the guilt from the so-called “bad cop” to the rest of the department where everyone can see it.
Dunc@#2:
They simply don’t need any additional protection on that score
Argggh, that’s perfectly true. Who needs protection against false accusation when you can shoot a running man in the back, claim they were attacking you, and not even be charged for it? They’re protected against true accusation.
Methinks it’s time to start producing very small cameras that can be planted on cop cars to monitor them, you know, so they don’t get lost and shit.
Can I have a body-cam?
Can everyone except cops have body-cams?
First thing I was thinking was “if my phone can automatically upload my pics on Flickr, why should body cams have only storage inside?”
chigau
Then your body cam will somehow be the first thing to get damaged/disappear. And you’ll be charged with something.
@chigau:
Eventually it will get to the point where everyone has a camera on the cops all the time.
If I had Peter Theil money I’d be looking at boosting the economy by starting an uber-like service for people who want to pick up a camera, monitor cops, and get paid by the hour for doing so. You know, to help protect the police. And to build a public heat-map of police activity.
Giliell@#6:
First thing I was thinking was “if my phone can automatically upload my pics on Flickr, why should body cams have only storage inside?”
I probably shouldn’t post pieces from my report (though it’s all irrelevant by now…) but one of the points I made is that if a stream of video contains something potentially sensitive the managers of the data vault won’t know what it is, and where, because it’s a) encrypted b) one stream among hundreds of thousands. Suppose officer Porko sees $famous_hollywood_personality in a compromising position, if the video streams are managed by the cops, officer Porko and their partners and co-workers know that the video exists, was captured on a certain day, and by a certain camera. So they can probably find it pretty easily. The managers of the vault have no idea because there’s more video coming in than they could possibly watch anyway, they have no idea what’s in what stream, and it’s encrypted. So it’s not like it’d be exposing the public to more scrutiny -- in fact, just the opposite. In information security we call this a “targeting problem” — knowing which target is the one to go after in an environment where there are thousands or more transient targets.
Make cops guilty until proven innocent if there’s any video tampering. That will stop it quickly.
Intransitive @9. I agree, and any evidence that the cops have is impermissible unless and until all footage is shared with the court/defense.