Cop kills woman, then Ooops! My body cam was unplugged!

[Fragile Bird]

Since he probably won't start a thread here, I'm going to post the story Daniel Abraham posted on Twitter. This happened in his home town, Albuquerque'

Former Albuquerque Police Officer Jeremy Dears body camera didnt malfunction when he chased, shot and killed 19-year-old Mary Hawkes.

The camera was not plugged in and even though the Albuquerque police higher-ups have refused to acknowledge this, fired officer Dear has acknowledged this repeatedly during the investigation into the shooting of the suspected car thief.

Dear said that Hawkes pointed a gun at him in the early morning hours of April 21. But after shooting her, Dear suddenly noticed the camera was accidentally unplugged. He plugged it in immediately, just in time to tell us what happened. Unfortunately, we are just supposed to take his word for everything.

Oh f, oh f, oh f, s, s, s. My camera. It was unplugged, Dear said in an interview with investigators.

The recording of the interview was obtained by the Journal under the Inspection of Public Records Act.

Ive had problems with it in the past. It comes unplugged and it wont record, Dear justified.

After plugging in his camera, he said, oh, Im going to be in trouble for this.

Unbelievably, Dear claims he was so close that he could see Hawkes gun with silver on the tip where the black gun was scratched.

But experts say that under that kind of stress, noticing these sorts of details is unusual at best.

I was scared to death. I dont think Ive ever been more scared in my life, Dear insisted in the interview. I was afraid to die. I didnt want to die. I have a girlfriend that I love very much. I have my 6-year-old son. I wanted to go home.

But Police Chief Gorden Eden, said in a news conference that they were not sure why Dears camera didnt work. Police sent the device back to the manufacturer for analysis, even though Dear admitted he had unplugged it.

Dear ended up being fired from the Albuquerque Police Department in December, but he has never been charged with any criminal act related to this shooting.

Thomas Grover, Dears attorney, said, This issue with cords coming unplugged I hear from officers all the time the issue with the cabling is a defect, he said. I think theres a design flaw.

Dear had to push a button on the battery to make the camera start recording. But he said he pushed it as he got out of the police cruiser and never heard the beep, so he acknowledges he knew from the start that it was not recording. So why did he act surprised once he plugged the camera in?

I was more concerned about watching her running, he said, explaining that he knew the camera was not recording.

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/02/cops-camera-malfunctions-then-turns-back-on/

The story happened last year: Mods, if this story has already been discussed in the running police thread, please amalgamate.

This kind of story makes me want to bang my head on the wall. But it does show police shoot and kill more than just black youth in suspicious circumstances.

[YoungGriff89]

There are a couple simple ways around selective use of body cameras. If I was in a position to do so and I was going to mandate body cameras (and if I had contacts with a good company who designed police equipment), I would try to get something set up to where a dash camera would turn on automatically when lights were flashed (this would be new technology since it would also reflect in the video what the clocked speed was on the radar). The rules for patrol officers would have to be different than beat officers, I would have to come back to a policy on what rules they would follow. The video file would be saved onto a memory card with the format: DATE TIME OFFICERNAME LASTFOUROFSOCIAL DASHCAM/ BODYCAM (201502112028DOEJ1234DASH). That would simplify finding footage of an incident, and the body cam would have the same format but say BODY at the end. You'd use both dash and body cams, you'd have no control over what the dash cam captured once the lights were flashed and it would be on you as the officer to turn it off manually when the stop/ citation ended (turn it off too early and that's a penalty). You don't have to have the body cam on 24/7, but if there is a complaint about a particular incident and you didn't have your cam on then you're automatically suspended without pay, and the complaint would have to be investigated.

The individual police departments would have no permissions to modify footage or delete files on their cameras, it would be backed up to a third party. Although, at this time I'm not sure how that would work or who the third party could be. My guess would be county personnel.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Would be nice if one of these times the camera works and the gun malfunctions.

[Biglose]

@YoungGriff89

ou don't have to have the body cam on 24/7, but if there is a complaint about a particular incident and you didn't have your cam on then you're automatically suspended without pay, and the complaint would have to be investigated.

So, you have to run it 24/7.

You can always say, something happend afterwards.

It starts with the simple issue of resolution of the camara. If you go by something like 144p then everybody looks, like they are holding a gun, because you just can't tell. If you go HD you do not have this problem anymore, but the filesize will increase drastically. So how much of a computer you will force officer to wear? Again in a car it is not a problem, because even if it weighs 30 pounds, its ok, the car does not mind.

A picture 800x600 pixel using only 16 bits color would mean you would need around 8 million bits or 1 MB per immage. Sure if you compress it gets smaller, but to do that you need processing power. You would need a recorder, which sends it to a computer and the computer takes the old recoring and comprimates it. Again, not an issue with a car. But handheld the amount of energy you would need to keep it running is bad enough.

Now, lets get to the real funny part: What is if a complaint is not failed right away. You need to collect the memory cards from time to time. They still would need to get sorted, meaning every police officer would need at least two. (You give them in at the end of your shift, but if you are working in a department with 100 cops, well it would take a while to sort through them, to arcchieve them etc. Will probably be done on the next day, meaning you need another chip for the next day. Now of course, something which is handled that often would be at risk of damage. So you need a spare.

It is easy to demand they should turn it on early enough and they should not shut it down prematurly. But in reality, thats hardly possible, when it would matter. It is only possible if you walk in a "calm" situation and exit it as a "calm" situation. That's not really the footage you would need.

Technology is not magic, it might seem to a lot of people like it, but it is not. So there will always be compromise on costs and just practicallity issues.

[paddington]

Can't they rig up something that the moment the gun leaves a holster then the camera comes on. Or gun cameras

[YoungGriff89]

@YoungGriff89

So, you have to run it 24/7.

You can always say, something happend afterwards.

It starts with the simple issue of resolution of the camara. If you go by something like 144p then everybody looks, like they are holding a gun, because you just can't tell. If you go HD you do not have this problem anymore, but the filesize will increase drastically. So how much of a computer you will force officer to wear? Again in a car it is not a problem, because even if it weighs 30 pounds, its ok, the car does not mind.

A picture 800x600 pixel using only 16 bits color would mean you would need around 8 million bits or 1 MB per immage. Sure if you compress it gets smaller, but to do that you need processing power. You would need a recorder, which sends it to a computer and the computer takes the old recoring and comprimates it. Again, not an issue with a car. But handheld the amount of energy you would need to keep it running is bad enough.

Now, lets get to the real funny part: What is if a complaint is not failed right away. You need to collect the memory cards from time to time. They still would need to get sorted, meaning every police officer would need at least two. (You give them in at the end of your shift, but if you are working in a department with 100 cops, well it would take a while to sort through them, to arcchieve them etc. Will probably be done on the next day, meaning you need another chip for the next day. Now of course, something which is handled that often would be at risk of damage. So you need a spare.

It is easy to demand they should turn it on early enough and they should not shut it down prematurly. But in reality, thats hardly possible, when it would matter. It is only possible if you walk in a "calm" situation and exit it as a "calm" situation. That's not really the footage you would need.

Technology is not magic, it might seem to a lot of people like it, but it is not. So there will always be compromise on costs and just practicallity issues.

It's not a perfect solution but my main motivation for suggesting the cameras not having to run 24/7 is because of the fact it would have to be HD video. That and the fact that running a body camera 24/7 would give you a lot of information you didn't need to sort through to find anything linked to an incident. I support video cameras as a way to support due process, not replace it.

For an officer who is just on the beat, yeah a body camera policy would be hard to regulate because they don't necessarily choose to interact with civilians and stopping to turn a camera might be impractical for the situation. I won't dispute that. My plan is more for officers who start in the safety of a vehicle. Even if they don't turn on the body cam there is still the dash cam to provide some context and help a jury make a slightly more informed decision.

[The Iceman of the North]

Can't they rig up something that the moment the gun leaves a holster then the camera comes on. Or gun cameras

But that leaves out the reason why the officer felt the need to draw the gun.

[Larry of the Lawn]

He felt threatened.

He thought he was in danger. He was not as calm as he should of been and reacted how any person with a gun might. The problem is that a police officer shouldn't be reacting like that, they should be disciplined in this kind of situation.

Right, of course they should be.... but they aren't; if they were, then we wouldn't need the body cameras. So what's your point?

[The Iceman of the North]

He felt threatened.

He thought he was in danger. He was not as calm as he should of been and reacted how any person with a gun might. The problem is that a police officer shouldn't be reacting like that, they should be disciplined in this kind of situation.

Yes, but I was referring to a comment about the camera being started once the gun is drawn. This seems like a useless point to start filming as what's going on in the moments before the drawing of the gun is just as vital as what happens next.

[Glaurung]

My point is if the cop was going to the crime he should have checked his camera was on first. He should of been a lot calmer than he was. They could of avoided a needless death if he just took a few seconds to think.

Perhaps a death could have been avoided, perhaps not. It would indeed be nice if cops could be more disciplined in dangerous situations, but the reality is that people panic in these situations, even people who have been trained. And the average cop isn't exactly a marine, the average cop is an over-equipped hall monitor with a gun. 99.9% of them never see action like this and never expect to. You can train all you want for a situation like this, but the only way to know if you will or won't panic in a life threatening situation is to be in one. Even soldiers who go through rigorous basic training, usually panic the first time they are thrown into a combat situation. To expect cops to sharp thinkers, disciplined, and calm in the potential line of fire is a nice thought, but completely unrealistic. The truth is they panic and they make mistakes when they have to make quick decisions. And it is difficult for outsiders to tell when an officer made a mistake in a tough situation or if he/she gunned down somebody in bloody murder. These cameras SHOULD be a way to fix that.

As for the camera being unplugged, there have been issues with the cameras, perhaps they do need to upgrade the technology. Officers may also forget sometimes...I forget my phone or my keys....or anything all the time, that is just the way I am and I know I would probably forget to turn my camera on if I was a cop, because I just do stuff like that. Perhaps they can program the cameras so that the cop is on the clock only when the camera is turned on. That way if the camera isn't turned on, they aren't clocked in and they aren't getting paid. It's hard to say in this case what the truth is. I believe there was a case like this a month or two ago where a cop gunned somebody down and forgot to turn his camera on and people were up in arms about it. Luckily a day or two later they had footage from a nearby store camera that showed the victim pulling a gun on the cop and he was cleared. Otherwise we might have been talking about him gunning down an innocent civilian and debating whether to charge him with murder/manslaughter.