We save flok video in cloud but cops cams are dumb enough that they can be turned off and on and that they save only locally, WTF
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Cops are allowed to break the law constantly and get off easy because politicians argue "no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions."
It's the dumbest thought process one could have. Wouldn't you want GOOD cops that follow laws instead of just people who know how to yell and shoot?
Well they wouldn't want to be politicians if they couldn't be corrupt shits in it to line their own pockets and hurt people they dislike. Of course they don't understand why someone would work for the goverment for any other reasons.
politicians argue "no one will want to be a cop if we hold them accountable for their actions."
That sounds a lot like when they insist that nobody will ever innovate if they ever have to pay taxes when they get rich off their product.
No, politicians make shit up to cover the fact what they really want are cops that obey them regardless of the law. Because they know if cops enforced the law equally, they'd be arrested for corruption.
Well, considering the entire concept of police came from mercenaries who were hired to "patrol" the neighborhood where factory workers and the liked lived to prevent revolts...it's all bullshit.
No. They want loyalty to protect their needs. It has shit to do with protecting the people.
Richard Pinheiro was found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of fabricating evidence in 2018 and received a three-year suspended sentence and two years of supervised probation, according to the Baltimore Sun.
How in the hell is malicious fraud that results in destroying someone's livelihood, reputation, and freedom with years of jailtime only a misdemeanor with a suspended sentence and probation. This kind of egregious action is waaaaay more damaging to the public welfare and safety than an individual possessing drugs for personal use, and yet the former gets you a "shame a on you", and the latter rips you from your family, your job, your life. This is some backwards shit.
Yeah, police falsifying evidence should carry the same penalties as the crime they falsified evidence for and a guaranteed firing. This country treats cops with a bizarre level of leniency
Not just the penalties for that specific crime either but the penalties the victim would get. Most cops plant stuff on people with criminal pasts or existing legal problems because they'll have a much harder time proving they are innocent. Such people get much higher penalties.
Certainly if they falsified a federal crime, the penalty shouldn't be any less than wire fraud, which is up to 20 years in prison.
The cameras worked by constantly recording even before the “record” button was pressed, periodically deleting any footage that hadn’t been intentionally recorded. Once the “record” button was pressed by the officer, it would capture the 30 seconds before the button had been pressed, thanks to this method of constantly being on standby.
But it was a hard concept for cops to understand. They weren’t being properly trained on the fact that their own cameras didn’t start recording once they pressed record. Hitting that button saved the 30 seconds prior as well, a neat feature that really bit them in the ass.
Maybe bodycams should randomly record even when the RECORD button isn't pressed by an officer; and the pre-record time should be random from say 2 minutes to 30 seconds before. And the recording should stop a random 30-60 seconds AFTER they hit 'STOP'. So they never know when they're being recorded. If they're not pulling illegal shit, they shouldn't have any problem with that, right?
In fact, with storage capabilities nowadays, bodycams should ALWAYS be recording, period. Gotta go to the bathroom? Too damn bad. You're a public servant. Trust the auditors to redact that if it comes to a court subpoena. You signed up for it. Extraordinary powers come with extraordinary sacrifices.
Jeebus Chripes. No wonder so many people say ACAB.
In fact, with storage capabilities nowadays, bodycams should ALWAYS be recording, period. Gotta go to the bathroom? Too damn bad. You're a public servant. Trust the auditors to redact that if it comes to a court subpoena. You signed up for it. Extraordinary powers come with extraordinary sacrifices.
You don't need to record them shitting, just make it explicit policy that any time police disable their body cams the default position for what happened is whatever is most favorable to members of the public and least favorable to officers. Full stop.
When we fly we are forced to let some stranger see our junk with the full body scanner
Gotta make sure no one is smuggling a full sized tube of tooth paste up their ass
Seems reasonable given that
Hobesrly with the angles of the body cams I doubt anything would be visible. 100% be audible though.
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I think we just need to revise the laws to say that a cop's testimony doesn't have any more weight than anyone else's testimony unless it's backed up by their bodycam.
Taking cops at their word made sense when we didn't have this technology. It doesn't make sense anymore.
I would even go a step further and say that cops' testimony should not even be accepted if they don't have bodycam footage to back it up. When you have a camera that's able to verify anything you need it to, the absence of that verification should be viewed through the lens that you specifically did not want whatever was happening during that time to be recorded.
Can you say: "conflict of interest"? We're at trial, the cop(s) who performed the arrest made a judgement call in the field - of course they're going to double down. What would it do for the career of a cop on the stand to say "you know, I think we made a mistake that day..."? The fact that the case has gone to trial basically makes the cop's testimony redundant, what they're going to say is basically a foregone conclusion, why waste time making them say it again?
I keep getting left off jury duty by honestly answering the question about whether I would give less weight to a cops testimony because they're a cop.
I suppose if there's ever a civil jury trial that doesn't involve a police testimony, I might serve in a jury.
A bit of a shame because I don't mind being on a jury. I'm not trying to get out of it. I'm just being honest.
People say ACAB because police are class traitors. They violently protect and serve the interest of capital.
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They absolutely should always be recording - and frequently backing up data to a server outside their control. Although it probably needs to have judicial oversight for access to days files?
But yeah, what's the damn point if it's controlled by the very people the technology is intended to provide oversight for?
Why would you need oversight for access? All footage of all officers interactions with the public available to all citizens within say a few days of being filmed. That's how you achieve oversight.
Absolutely agree. The way things are it's just another flavor of the "we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong" bullshit.
This would be nice but it ignores the fact cops (like we have today) shouldn't exist at all. Cops are not the only way to do law enforcement.
The company that sells the cameras and the police buying them don't want that. The guy who owns the company that makes most body cams advertises that the cameras don't record more accurately than the human eye. This enables cops to show a blurry 16fps 720p video and go "it looked like he was pulling out a gun".
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Well hey, I have a few questions:
- Why do bodycams even have a user-accessible switch? Why isn’t some sort of magnetic or RFID/NFC mechanism that’s only actuated by the docking station back at the precinct?
- Why aren’t they running constantly for as long as they’re on shift?
- Why do police (or any law enforcement mandated to wear body cams) have literally any control or review capability over the cameras and the footage they generate? Why isn’t an entirely discrete and separate agency firewalled off from the cops?
Any police testimony not accompanied by some kind of recording should be inadmissible in court. Likewise any evidence collected while a camera isn't recording should also be inadmissible. Police have shown again and again that they can't be trusted and they're almost always a less reliable witness than some random bystander. It's about time we actually started treating them that way.
I took a speeding ticket to court, had the officer sitting behind me pre-trial talkin' smack with a colleague "why are you here? Speeding, ha, how hard is that?" Yeah, so he gets on the stand and "reads from his notes" every single thing he said was fabricated, only my location was accurate, his location was a lie: in reality he "witnessed" me from a side street 3 blocks back from the intersection he crossed but in his testimony he "observed me passing a line of five cars" - yeah, except that never happened, what I was passing was a single gardening truck doing 10mph for the past 3 blocks, the other 4 cars were stacked up behind me.
Maybe he really thought that's what he saw, which is all the more reason his dashcam should have been the evidence, not his notebook. https://www.restonyc.com/can-you-not-be-a-police-officer-with-a-high-iq/
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People keep proposing naive solutions without realizing cops only use bodycams because they see them as net benefit for them. The technology was around for a long time but only became popular when it was sold as surveillance tool, not accountability tool. If police loses control of the footage they will simply stop using them. If you force them they will protest. Guess who the politicians will support in this fight?
There are only two ways to fix this that I see:
- Settlements need to be paid out of the cops' pension fund.
- Send more cops to prison.
Neither of which the US is going to do, because here, the cops and law enforcement are a civic religion. Therefore the best most Americans can do is keep their heads down and avoid the bastards as best you can manage.
cops should carry liability insurance just like doctors and a cops rates will be effected by where they work. When one cop watches another break the rules they should be watching their monthly premiums rise.
In Spain when cops fuck up you simply take away their ability to work in law enforcement. It's really that simple. In US they will just get hired by another city. The problem in US is not that this is hard to solve and requires some clever, hard to write legislation. The problem is that law enforcement always worked for the elites, not the masses and no one in power wants to change it.
It's also that cops have put an amount of investment into pr that is unique among government employees (and that includes pushing you to not think of them as just more government employees) except maybe the military. They're bleeding your local budget dry, but if the news reports on stuff like that or their misconduct they lose access to crime leads. There's a massive push to make you think highly of them. Here's a video I recently watched on the topic that points to true crime as a possible in to get ordinary people to see the cops as as flawed as they are
Very interesting. I assumed that police always held privileged status in US but this could be simply because they are always portrayed like that in movies, even historical ones. The PR is definitely there. In pretty much every movie caps break the laws and ignore rights of everyone and it's shown as something necessary and even 'cool'. Bad guys don't deserve rights...
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The technical solution is: body cam footage is automatically, frequently, uploaded to cloud servers that the department does not control. The department gets read-only access, nobody gets the ability to delete footage for 7 years, and defense attorneys get automatic access to everything remotely related to their case.
Also: planting evidence and sending the falsely accused to prison for 6 months is a misdemeanor punished with suspended sentences and probation? That department owes the falsely accused damages for lost wages and damage to their ability to obtain future employment. That's actually a "superpower" cops know all too well: if you've never been arrested they can seriously screw up your life with absolute impunity just by arresting you - charges never have to be filed, that arrest on your record - however baseless it may be - can hurt you in all sorts of ways, especially employability, for the rest of your life.
The easiest way to get this accomplished politically is to create insurance for them. Have the departments cover the base insurance rate and premium increases from settlements increase that officers insurance which (s)he has to pay out of their pay. If the insurance is unaffordable then you can no longer be a police.
Exactly, that is not a cure all but it's a doable fix that could be implemented even in today's political environment with a little work. Every cop gets the amount of their liability insurance it would cost if they weren't a prick, and they pay the premium.
Every cop gets a score already by liability insurance that departments carry, so it would just be shifting those costs, and would involve renegotiating their union contracts.
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I get the nuance in these replies and not trying to go off topic but general theme is not only do the overseers not care but it’s by design at all levels, from the officer, the equipment supplier, to the courts.
You have had an execution In the street and the authorities will not acknowledge it never mind apologise or make steps to make it right.
Same same. Corruption, submission, fascism.
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