The Knight Life by Keith Knight for January 01, 2015

Just wait’ll he gets presented with a body camera. (Actually, body cameras worn by cops in Rialto, CA are strongly correlated with a significant drop in both police use of force and complaints against the police. Good for both civilians and cops. Not bad, eh?

It sounds good, but apparently makes them feel less exceptional. Feels like they forgot there are blue collars on those uniform shirts.

One thing I am proud of in my city is that the local police wears body cameras for over a year now. When replacing their dashboard cams, they realized that body cameras are actually cheaper (and can be clipped to the rearview mirror), so it was a win-win situation.

Perhaps some of you woke up to

Happy New Year!         (click above text for ecard)    

I’m getting really tired of this theme. If it’s still going on tomorrow, I will say goodbye to the Knight Life

Re: body cams— the next issue is privacy. When every interaction is recorded, what about those who don’t want to be recorded? The bystanders/witnesses? when do the recordings get released to the public, and who (if anyone) gets to edit them?

The use of deadly force is always a possibility in police work

This is true. On the other hand, it’s instructive to look at the case of England, where, according to The Economist:

“Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero. In 2012 the figure was just one. Even after adjusting for the smaller size of Britain’s population, British citizens are around 100 times less likely to be shot by a police officer than Americans. Between 2010 and 2014 the police force of one small American city, Albuquerque in New Mexico, shot and killed 23 civilians; seven times more than the number of Brits killed by all of England and Wales’s 43 forces during the same period.”

Part of the reason, according to the author, is the huge difference in the number of guns on the streets in England versus the U.S. But when you consider, for instance, the number of killings by police in Canada in 2014 (14), where gun ownership is equivalent to or may even exceed that in the US, the large disparity in shootings per population is striking. That is, you’re much more likely to be killed by a cop in the US than you are in Canada. And that’s without taking into account all the shootings that aren’t counted in federal statistics.

Getting back to your point about body cams, the study in Rialto, CA that I referred to in my previous post suggests that if they came into wide use, there could actually be a reduction of shootings by police. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Give it up, Keef. Well documented that cameras reduce both the number of unprovoked instances of police violence and the number of unsubstantiated accusations of police brutality. You’re beating a horse that died being born.

Actually, he has a point, if police UNIONS in some locations are the joke’s target, and he is also right when some of the violent police are concerned. Even though the cameras reduce not only complaints but also violence against citizens AND police in the study (and a larger study appears in leaks of info to be duplicating those results), AND even though the cameras and the typical ways of maintaining the data cost 1/4 what court costs generated by complaints and violence cost, there are some police unions demanding outrageous levels of processing and storage to try to raise costs high enough to shelve the camera use. I am hoping that some of his future strips will juxtapose good cops against this one.