Missing Police Body Camera Videos: Remedies, Evidentiary Fairness, and Automatic Activation

A movement toward police regulation by recording is sweeping the nation. Responding to calls for accountability, transparency and better evidence, departments have rapidly adopted body cameras. Recording policies require the police to record more law enforcement encounters than ever before. But what happens if officers do not record? This is an important, growing area of controversy. Based on the collection and coding of police department body camera policies, this Article reveals widespread detection and enforcement gaps regarding failures to record as required. More than half of the major-city departments in the sample have no provisions specifying consequences for not recording as required—and several have protections against discipline. The Article discusses how the labor-management structure of departments and the individual-blame nature of disciplinary processes render internal departmental enforcement of recording rules challenging. As the central framers of conduct rules for police, and as gatekeepers of evidence, courts have an important role to play in addressing the missing video problem. The challenge is how to frame remedies that avoid judicial inquiry deterrence: a reluctance to address missing video issues because it would entail messy and costly collateral mini-trials on whether recordings are missing for legitimate reasons or due to officer malfeasance. This Article proposes three judicial pretrial remedies that proceed from a more administrable evidentiary fairness perspective: exclusion of partial recordings, favorable inferences, and pattern and practice detection harnessing systemic facts accumulated by courts in criminal cases

Applying psychological science to the CCTV review process: a review of cognitive and ergonomic literature

As CCTV cameras are used more and more often to increase security in communities, police are spending a larger proportion of their resources, including time, in processing CCTV images when investigating crimes that have occurred (Levesley & Martin, 2005; Nichols, 2001). As with all tasks, there are ways to approach this task that will facilitate performance and other approaches that will degrade performance, either by increasing errors or by unnecessarily prolonging the process. A clearer understanding of psychological factors influencing the effectiveness of footage review will facilitate future training in best practice with respect to the review of CCTV footage. The goal of this report is to provide such understanding by reviewing research on footage review, research on related tasks that require similar skills, and experimental laboratory research about the cognitive skills underpinning the task. The report is organised to address five challenges to effectiveness of CCTV review: the effects of the degraded nature of CCTV footage, distractions and interrupts, the length of the task, inappropriate mindset, and variability in people’s abilities and experience. Recommendations for optimising CCTV footage review include (1) doing a cognitive task analysis to increase understanding of the ways in which performance might be limited, (2) exploiting technology advances to maximise the perceptual quality of the footage (3) training people to improve the flexibility of their mindset as they perceive and interpret the images seen, (4) monitoring performance either on an ongoing basis, by using psychophysiological measures of alertness, or periodically, by testing screeners’ ability to find evidence in footage developed for such testing, and (5) evaluating the relevance of possible selection tests to screen effective from ineffective screener

Multimodal Egocentric Analysis of Focused Interactions

Continuous detection of social interactions from wearable sensor data streams has a range of potential applications in domains, including health and social care, security, and assistive technology. We contribute an annotated, multimodal data set capturing such interactions using video, audio, GPS, and inertial sensing. We present methods for automatic detection and temporal segmentation of focused interactions using support vector machines and recurrent neural networks with features extracted from both audio and video streams. The focused interaction occurs when the co-present individuals, having the mutual focus of attention, interact by first establishing the face-to-face engagement and direct conversation. We describe an evaluation protocol, including framewise, extended framewise, and event-based measures, and provide empirical evidence that the fusion of visual face track scores with audio voice activity scores provides an effective combination. The methods, contributed data set, and protocol together provide a benchmark for the future research on this problem

Police Body Cameras: Mending Fences and How Pittsburgh is a Leading Example

After the police brutality deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, amongst others, many call for increased accountability through police officer body-worn cameras. The following Note discusses the potential benefits of body camera use, the concerns that body cameras raise, relevant current and pending legislation in Pennsylvania, and whether police body cameras can be used to address race relations in connection with police officer brutality

Police Body-Worn Cameras

Since the summer of 2014, community members, politicians, and police executives across the country have called for greater police accountability and improvements in police-community relations. Body-worn cameras are widely seen as serving both ends. Today, thousands of police agencies are exploring, adopting, and implementing body-cam programs. A survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Major County Sheriffs’ Association found that 95% of surveyed agencies had either implemented or were committed to implementing a BWC program. Body-worn cameras are here, and more are coming. Mary Fan, for example, has described a “camera cultural revolution” in which “the future will be recorded.” Legal scholars have largely responded to this burgeoning new technology by addressing it through the framework of traditional discussions about privacy, police accountability, or the rules of evidence. Relatively few articles have gone further by identifying the potential benefits of BWCs and critically examining whether the adoption of this technology by police agencies can truly do what the many proponents claim. This Article falls solidly into the latter camp. This Article is not intended to endorse or condemn police body-cams, but rather to identify and critically examine the potential benefits of the technology in light of its capabilities and limitations. For more than two years now, I have educated a variety of audiences about police BWCs, from state supreme court justices to practicing attorneys and from police executives to rank-and-file officers, and I have repeatedly been asked some variant of what appears to be a simple question: are body cameras a good idea? My response is no doubt familiar to law students across the country: it depends. Body-worn cameras are a tool. Tools should be used to advance normatively desirable goals when they are an efficient way of accomplishing or facilitating those goals. Body-cameras, like any tool, should not be used when the goal itself it inappropriate or when the tool is ill-suited for the job at hand. This Article explores the limits of BWCs as a tool. It does so by first reviewing the historical justifications for, implementation of, and lessons learned from an earlier iteration of police video recording technology: in-car cameras. It then offers a simplified way of conceptualizing the multitudinous advantages that BWC proponents have identified, putting them into three categories: symbolic benefits, behavioral benefits, and informational benefits. This classification is a necessary first-step in police agencies and communities articulating what they hope to achieve with a BWC program. Whether body-cams will advance the desired goals depends on the practical limitations of the technology and our ability to interpret the resulting video footage as well as the policies and procedures that govern implementation. The latter half of the paper is dedicated to a critical examination of the practical limitations and policy considerations that will ultimately determine whether body-worn cameras can live up to the hype

Privacy Localism

Privacy law scholarship often focuses on domain-specific federal privacy laws and state efforts to broaden them. This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of privacy regulation at the local level (which it dubs “privacy localism”), using recently enacted privacy laws in Seattle and New York City as principal examples. Further, this Article attributes the rise of privacy localism to a combination of federal and state legislative failures and three emerging urban trends: the role of local police in federal counterterrorism efforts; smart city and open data initiatives; and demands for local police reform in the wake of widely reported abusive police practices. Both Seattle and New York City have enacted or proposed (1) a local surveillance ordinance regulating the purchase and use of surveillance equipment and technology by city departments, including the police, and (2) a law regulating city departments’ collection, use, disclosure, and retention of personal data. In adopting these local laws, both cities have sought to fill two significant gaps in federal and state privacy laws: the public surveillance gap, which refers to the weak constitutional and statutory protections against government surveillance in public places, and the fair information practices gap, which refers to the inapplicability of the federal and state privacy laws to government records held by local government agencies. Filling these gaps is a significant accomplishment and one that exhibits all of the values typically associated with federalism such as diversity, participation, experimentation, responsiveness, and accountability. This Article distinguishes federalism and localism and shows why privacy localism should prevail against the threat of federal and—more importantly—state preemption. This Article concludes by suggesting that privacy localism has the potential to help shape emerging privacy norms for an increasingly urban future, inspire more robust regulation at the federal and state levels, and inject more democratic control into city deployments of privacy-invasive technologies

Critically Envisioning Biometric Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement

This report presents an overview of the Critically Exploring Biometric AI Futures project led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the University of Stirling. This short 3-month project explored the use of new Biometric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement, the challenges of fostering trust around deployment and debates surrounding social, ethical and legal concerns

Critically Envisioning Biometric Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement

This report presents an overview of the Critically Exploring Biometric AI Futures project led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the University of Stirling. This short 3-month project explored the use of new Biometric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement, the challenges of fostering trust around deployment and debates surrounding social, ethical and legal concerns