By Radley Balko
A couple of weeks ago, I put up
a post looking at the main problem with relying on video from video cameras
mounted to police officers and to the dashboards of their squad cars — there
have been a number of police misconduct cases in which video has gone missing,
or in which cameras have malfunctioned at critical times.
It doesn’t matter how
potentially beneficial the technology is if the cops using it are going to
undermine its transparency value, and if police agencies and courts don’t
subsequently hold those cops accountable.
Currently, the Los Angeles
Police Department is experimenting with body cameras for its police officers.
It’s a good step toward more transparency. But it’s critical that the
department has and maintains the public trust. The citizens of L.A. need to
know that the video from these cameras will be there not only to exonerate good
cops accused of wrongdoing, but also to implicate bad cops. If cops can simply
turn off their cameras at will, or if incriminating video can be destroyed
without consequence, the cameras become tools of corruption, not of
transparency.
To that end, this is a
troubling sign:
Los Angeles police officers
tampered with voice recording equipment in dozens of patrol cars in an effort
to avoid being monitored while on duty, according to records and interviews.
An inspection by Los Angeles
Police Department investigators found about half of the estimated 80 cars in
one South L.A. patrol division were missing antennas, which help capture what
officers say in the field. The antennas in at least 10 more cars in nearby
divisions had also been removed . . .
A federal judge last year
formally ended more than a decade of close monitoring of the LAPD by the U.S.
Department of Justice. The judge agreed to lift the oversight, in part, after
city and police leaders made assurances that the LAPD had adequate safeguards,
such as the cameras, in place to monitor itself . . .
The cameras, which turn on
automatically whenever an officer activates the car’s emergency lights and
sirens or can be activated manually, are used to record traffic stops and other
encounters that occur in front of the vehicle. Officers also wear small
transmitters on their belts that relay their voices back to the antennas in the
patrol car. Regardless of whether they are in front of the camera, officers’
voices can be recorded hundreds of yards away from the car, said Sgt. Dan
Gomez, a department expert on the recording devices . . .
