Seattle Police Held Hackathon To Redact Footage From Body Cameras 93
An anonymous reader writes: Hackathons are common these days, but you don't often hear about events hosted by law enforcement. That's what the Seattle Police Department did on Friday, with the solitary goal of finding a good way to redact the video streams taken by police body cameras and dash cameras. Seven different teams demonstrated solutions, but in the end, none thought automation could realistically handle the task in the near future. "The Washington State public records act requires that almost all video filmed by any government agency – including police – be disclosed upon request. The only real exception is for video which is part of an open case currently under investigation. However, various parts of the state code include other restrictions – the identity of minors cannot be disclosed. Requests from victims or witnesses who may be at risk if their identities are disclosed also must be honored. However in all such cases the video still must be released – it is just the faces or other potential identifying characteristics, which might include gender or even a person's gait – which need to be blurred and redacted." The city just started a pilot program for body-worn police cameras.
Why dashcams? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dashcams stay on the cruiser which is always in a public space. There is no need to redact that video unless you have something to hide.
Re:Why dashcams? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why dashcams? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem, of course, is that the whole point of body cams was that we can't trust the police, so any means of redacting content which needs redacting will likely be used to redact anything which casts a bad light on the officers.
It will be redacted for FOIA requests. But the original video will still be available for other purposes. For instance, if someone sues the police for misconduct, they could subpena the original uncut video. If the police charge someone with a crime, then that defendant's attorney will also have access to the original video.
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if you think for a moment that the redacting process wouldn't be used to hide the police officer's illegal activities you weren't really thinking now were you.
Re:Why dashcams? (Score:4, Informative)
seattle's the city that tried to set up a secret police surveillance system [americanfreepress.net] (based on MAC addresses) using the free city-wide wifi network, so any inconvenience caused to the police is well deserved. they can kiss my ass.
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Exactly,
The conspiracy theorists have to dial it down a bit.
The redacting is for faces that must be protected by law, such as children, and witnesses.
Hardly make sense for the police to release photos of witnesses so that the thugs homeboys can put a hit on them.
The redaction is Like the redaction on street view, blurring of faces.
There are also places where the police have no right to film, such as in homes.
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I'd like to disagree. There are things that shouldn't be revealed under FOIA requests. Unfortunately the example of the federal government proves that we cannot trust redation to be applied in a reasonable manner.
I don't see a good answer.
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Cams are as much to stop citizen abuse as they are to stop police abuse.
In fact, will be born out after a couple years of vest cam usage.
Also, you may want to rethink your position. When the gunny drives by and peppers your house with automatic weapons fire just because your un-redacted face and voice appeared in a police video you will (too late) realize that you have surrendered the streets to the thugs.
Missing the Point (Score:1)
The important question is and always ought to be, are those whom the redaction laws are meant to protect going to feel safe otherwise? I suspect that the concern is not that a gang member will use a FOIA request to get the video clip, but that a news broadcaster will, will air it, and the gang member will see or hear of it.
The 'magically turn that face into an address' process is something known as 'facial recognition' and 'memory.' You do it every time you recognize somebody and remember where they live an
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Which is of course, part of the reason that the police rely as much as they can on forensic and surveillance data rather than witness data. While emotionally effective for juries, witnesses do have a distressingly poor memory, easily fooled by both themselves and the cross-examining
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There should be no redaction at all.
So when your daughter is raped, and goes to the police, you will have no problem with her full, unredacted, interview going up on Youtube?
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Re:Why dashcams? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's in public space, but not always a good idea to release publicly. For example, if a cop happens to be the first person on the scene of an accident I was involved in, I would prefer if that video is not released, unless it's necessary to a court case. If it were a medical first responder it'd actually be illegal for them to release film of me in that situation, under HIPAA. Cops are exempt from HIPAA, but that doesn't make it a good idea for them to completely ignore privacy of 3rd parties.
Re:Why dashcams? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the cops in my town are required to be licensed as medical first responders (one step below emt).
Also, many times it's not in a public space as it's not uncommon for an officer to enter a private home.
If dashcams are considered public then instead of sponsoring hackathons they need to change the laws.
There are many situations where someone calls 911 for medical or other reasons where they would not
want the content of the call or a video of them to be public. Police officers many times enter
private residents and might accidently stumble upon situations like someone who fell in the shower,
opened the door in their bathrobe, someone who had just got raped, or dozens of other situations where
you just got victimized and are disclosing very personal infomation either over the phone to the 911
operator or to the police when they arrive that you don't want and don't expect to be public data.
Police cams should be treated the same way as 911 calls and neither should be public without consent
of at least one person present at the scene (or their next of kin if they died). Allowing only a single
consent (instead of everyone present) and allowing next of kin to give that consent should strike a
good balance between keeping most situations private but still allowing easy access to prevent abuse
of power to restrict access.
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Wycliffe:
> Police cams should be treated the same way as 911 calls
bingo
ShanghaiBill:
> If the police charge someone with a crime, then that defendant's
> attorney will also have access to the original video.
double bingo
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An expungement is not always easy to obtain, as in many states it requires a much higher burden of proof (positive finding of innocence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, for many states) and it doesn't address the issue created when that video/audio recording reveals the private medical history of a person that doesn't give consent and can't be consented for release unless by the person involved or by someone holding a power of attorney over the subject. Let's try a little thought experiment as an exam
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Absolutely. We should not be wasting time and money allowing free access to video footage. If someone has a legal claim or suspects police abuse in a specific situation that directly concerns them then there should be a means to obtain it, but it just isn't practical to make all of it available to any yahoo that wants hundreds of hours of footage and has no direct involvement in the filmed activities. Privacy is more important in this case than FOIA in my book and the police do not have the resources to was
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You are on a public road, and the police show up. You have no right to privacy. It doesn't matter what your preferences are.
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Incorrect. It does matter what my preferences are, and I do have a right to privacy. The camera footage should and will be redacted.
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You are on a public road. You have no right to privacy. It's the law of the land.
You can naysay that all you want - but anyone with a camera has the right to film public areas. If you don't want to be filmed - stay on private property.
Don't hate the messenger... :)
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ps
https://www.aclu.org/kyr-photo [aclu.org] :)
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So says the professor.
The Judges don't always agree.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]
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Now where have I heard that argument before...?
All the same, dashcams should be mandatory. They protect good cops while catching or putting a check on bad cops, and add an extra POV that neither the cop or the accused had available to them. Bonus witness.
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Dash cams don't always stay on. In many departments around Seattle they are only on when the lights are on.
You always need to redact video.
Police interview people who might not cooperate if they know that they will be shown snitching on YouTube. Oh, how about when an officer shows up to a scene of domestic abuse, shoud that just go up on YouTube?
Police often see the public in bad situations. And we don't need to put that stuff up on the we for everyone to see.
That is why they are working on redaction, not b
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So, just hypothetically speaking, you would be okay with being followed and every single one of your actions recorded and publicly reported 24/7? Because with modern computer vision and ubiquitous cameras, that question is becoming less hypothetical every day. And that, in turn, is quickly turning the entire society into a giant panopticon.
Look up Finlandization [wikipedia.org]. Hell can
Who will guard the guardians? (Score:2)
Re:Who will guard the guardians? (Score:4, Insightful)
FOIA requests should not apply to police cams or 911 calls. The FOIA has a clear exemption
for where the privacy of the individual will be violated. Here is a good summary of how the
FOIA interacts with privacy laws: http://people.howstuffworks.co... [howstuffworks.com]
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From the GeekWire article:
However, Seattle Police officials also admitted that about 90 percent of the video officers create probably needs no redaction at all. That’s because members of the public have no right to expect privacy in their interactions with police, unless they are juveniles or a witness or victim whose safety might be at risk if their identity is known.
~~
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Police thuggery and corruption or be a Glasshole, I think I will take the thuggery.
Not just cameras,but a department of police police (Score:1)
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just go the area with poor cell coverage and then the video feed stops and the cops can't be at fault.
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"Just wait until a gang of thugs beats you to a bloody pulp and rapes your girlfriend.
You'll be thinking differently about the cops then."
See how you can make this argument more effective by removing unnecessary racism?
Simple Solution (Score:2)
Is the US government really so dysfunctional (Score:2)
That they can't change the law?
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[insert your own snappy rejoinder about dysfunctional posters here]
~~
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Huh? Who said anything about federal law?
Washington State is part of the US, isn't it? (According to Wikipedia, anyway.) So I would expect the phrase "US government" to include the government of Washington State, along with all other governments within the US. Do you really use it only to describe the federal government? What do you say instead when you mean the federal government *and* the government of the States and other territories collectively?
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Yes. Pretty much, "US government" refers to the Feds.
We hardly ever talk about that. At levels lower than the Feds, we talk about "State and local governments" from time to time
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I'm not a lawyer, but cities and towns can pass their own laws with the permission of the State, but only with permission isn't exactly true.
I'm not aware of any local government asking permission for passing a law of any higher government.
Tangent: what's the ordering, and does it vary with state? In NY we have county govt, town, city / village.). My understanding is that each level down can be more restrictive, but not less so, than a level above. That is, NY allows alcohol sales, but not cocaine sales. A
How to operate police body cameras. (Score:1)
Redaction is Insufficient (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to go past simple rules which can be changed at whim. We need to mandate encryption of all video and the decryption keys must be stored with a 3rd party who will only release an individual key in response to a court-issued warrant. Not just a court order that any court clerk can sign, but a full-blown judge-signed warrant. We also need official data-expiration policies such than anything older than a year is deleted unless there has been a petition to preserve it - and that's a mere petition to preserve, you'll still need a warrant to decrypt but preservation pending a warrant needs to be easy enough.
If we don't make access physically difficult (versus administratively difficult) it is inevitable that these videos will end up in databases the way license plate scans have. And ten years down the road when Moore's law has kicked up our computational power up by another 100x they'll be running facial recognition, voice recognition, engine-sound recognition, gait-recognition, etc on the videos and data-mining the F out of it so that it becomes a tool for oppression worse than no video at all.
There are a lot of valid reasons to make the video available to the police - better supervision, training (replay their own mistakes as well as study the mistakes of others), etc. But, everything in life is a trade-off and the price of those minor beneficial uses will be state abuse of the camera footage. The only way to preserve liberty is to design the system such that no one, no one at all, has unrestricted physical access to footage.
Re: Redaction is Insufficient (Score:2, Interesting)
This is where a DMS comes in. TRIM could do the job. Once a file is stored it can not be deleted exept by admins. All views are logged. Everything is logged.
Once a video is cut upload it, encrypt locally and upload to the server later.
Introduce severe penalties for tampering.
There may even be an open solution DMS capable of the same.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
You mean in the real world there are conflicting priorities and complexities?
But this is Slashdot - I demand that the situation be simple and resolvable by unidirectional moral outrage!
A Simple legal change that would help (Score:1)
No redaction necessary (Score:1)
San Diego (Score:1)
Unbelievable levels of hypocrisy going on here... (Score:1)