Oversight Board Report On DC Police Cameras Contradicts Earlier Report's Claims
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Less than a month after a first report was delivered on Washington, DC police body camera use, a second one has arrived. And it seems to contradict some assertions made in the first report.The first report was put together by an extension of DC's government called the Lab@DC. It showed body camera use doing almost nothing to curtail use of force by officers. This seemed to undercut the notion body cameras can be a tool of accountability. But they never will be -- not if the agencies using them remain uninterested in punishing officers for misconduct.The Lab@DC report stated officers -- more than 2,000 of them -- weren't observed repeatedly or intentionally violating body camera activation policies.Other researchers have suggested that BWCs may fail to affect outcomes because of nonadherence: officers, for a variety of reasons, may not use their assigned cameras according to departmental policy. They may fail to turn on the camera, for example. We have no indication that non-adherence was a widespread problem in this study. For 98% of the days in 2016, MPD averaged at least one video (and often many more) per call for service associated with a treatment officer. Further, even for the 2% of days in 2016 in which the number of videos uploaded was less than the number of incidents for which we would expect them, the difference is minimal, with 96% average adherence based on our measure. The latest report, however, comes to the opposite conclusion. This one [PDF], put together by DC's police oversight board, shows plenty of nonadherence. (via FourthAmendment.com)More than a third of cases investigated by a D.C. police oversight board after complaints were made about officers’ conduct this past year involved officers who did not properly use their body-worn cameras during those incidents, according to a report made public Tuesday.Some officers turned the cameras on too late, others too early, the report from the Office of Police Complaints found. In 13 percent of the cases, at least one officer at a crime scene or incident failed to turn on the camera, though colleagues did. This is causing problems with accountability. Michael G. Tobin, the director of the Office of Police Complaints, says these "failures" sometimes compromise entire internal investigations. But he's also quick to excuse the officers, citing the newness of the technology.The "newness" may contribute to some unintentional failure to follow policy, but it's not as though the department's body camera policy is full of contradictory instructions on activations.MPD General Order SPT-302.13 specifies that “[m]embers, including primary, secondary, and assisting members, shall start their BWC recordings as soon as a call is initiated via radio or communication from OUC [Office of Unified Communications] on their mobile data computer (MDC), or at the beginning of any self-initiated police action.” Cameras should be rolling for pretty much any officer interaction with the public. The problem for DC police oversight -- and the public itself -- is that these activation failures compromise investigations of police misconduct. To investigators inside and outside the department, there's no discernible difference between forgetting to turn on a camera and deliberately leaving a camera off. The small upside is the 2,800 cameras in use, which lowers the chance that all responding officers will fail to produce footage.The camera policy doesn't leave activation to officer discretion. But the hardware does, and that's an issue that needs to be addressed. Surprisingly, it's the local police union that's calling for additional accountability measures.Police Sgt. Matthew Mahl, the chairman of the police union, said he plans to ask the department for new equipment that would automatically turn on body cameras when a gun is removed from the holster. That will help cover cases where deadly force is threatened or deployed. But there are a lot of misconduct and excessive force complaints that will fall through the "gun out, camera on" cracks.The combination of both reports suggests cameras still aren't fixing law enforcement. Too many officers still feel the equipment is optional, even when it's issued at the start of every shift and clipped to their chests for the next 12 hours. If there's no downturn in force deployment, it's because no one's made it clear the absence of footage should be nearly as damning as the existence of damning footage.
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posted at: 12:00am on 04-Nov-2017
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Internet Association Sells Out The Internet: Caves In And Will Now Support Revised SESTA
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This morning, at about the same time as I published my article criticizing Senator Portman's decision to push forward with SESTA, an amended version of the bill was released, that has only a few small changes. Most notably it appears to improve the "knowledge" standard, which was definitely the worst part of the bill. The original bill had the following standard:The term 'participation in a venture' means knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports, or facilitates a violation... The concern here was twofold. "Knowing conduct" means knowing of the conduct, not the outcome. That is, knowing that people can comment, not that those comments "facilitate" a violation of sex trafficking laws. That's way too broad. Separately, the "assists, supports, or facilitates" language is very broad, and includes completely passive actions (facilitates), rather than active participation.The updated manager's amendment fixes... just some of this. It now says:The term 'participation in a venture' means knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation... So now it's "knowingly" doing the other things, rather than just "knowing conduct." That's better. But, it's still very broad. And the "facilitation" is still there. Making it "knowingly facilitates" certainly helps, but it's still much broader than before. Because you have now created what is effectively a notice-and-takedown system for all kinds of content. Someone just needs to claim that your site "facilitates" sex trafficking, and now you have "knowledge." Thus, the strong incentive will be to remove, remove, remove. As we already see, the DMCA notice and takedown provisions are widely abused. Anyone who thinks this won't be widely abused has not been paying attention.Furthermore, even "knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating" is going to lead to a lot of problems. We know this because we already lived through it with the DMCA. The entire 10 year fight between Viacom and YouTube was, in large part, over the definition of "knowing." Because Viacom wanted it to be a broad standard of "knowing that bad stuff happens on the platform," while YouTube argued (correctly) for an "actual knowledge" meaning, which means that you would have to have knowledge of specific content that violates the law, and then be responsible for removing that specific content. If you just make "knowing" the standard, without the "actual knowledge" part, you're in for lawsuits arguing that general knowledge makes you guilty. And that could impact tons of companies.Take Tinder. The incredibly popular dating app is almost certainly used by some sex traffickers to traffic people against their will. Here's an article from three years ago talking about sex trafficking on Tinder. Boom. Now Tinder has "knowledge" that its platform is "assisting, supporting, or facilitating" sex trafficking. It may now be both civilly and criminally liable. So, you tell me, what should Tinder do to get rid of this liability? I'll wait. And if you think no one will bother to sue Tinder over something like this, need I remind you of the many lawsuits we've been writing about in which people are suing every social media platform because vaguely defined "terrorists" use the platform?At least under the DMCA there's a clear "safe harbor" setup, whereby companies know the conditions under which they need to remove stuff to avoid liability. SESTA has no safe harbor language. It just says knowledge. But then what? We're in for years of litigation before courts determine what the hell this means, and that likely means startups will die. And others will never even have a chance to get off the ground.And, once again, this doesn't solve the other giant concern we had about the original bill, which is that this will encourage platforms to stop helping law enforcement and to stop monitoring their platforms for trafficking, because doing so can constitute "knowledge" and make them liable, if they are unable to wave a magic wand and make all such conduct disappear.In other words, the new bill is still hugely problematic.And that's why it's extremely troublesome that the Internet Association -- the giant lobbying organization representing larger internet companies, has now come out in support of the new SESTA:Internet Association is committed to combating sexual exploitation and sex trafficking online and supports SESTA. Important changes made to SESTA will grant victims the ability to secure the justice they deserve, allow internet platforms to continue their work combating human trafficking, and protect good actors in the ecosystem.Internet Association thanks cosponsors Sen. Portman and Sen. Blumenthal for their careful work and bipartisan collaboration on this crucially important topic and Chairman Thune and Ranking Member Nelson for their leadership of the Commerce Committee. We look forward to working with the House and Senate as SESTA moves through the legislative process to ensure that our members are able to continue their work to fight exploitation. I honestly am flabbergasted at this move by the Internet Association. This will do serious, serious harm to tons of internet companies. Since the Internet Association represents the bigger tech companies, perhaps they stupidly feel that they can handle the resulting mess. But smaller organizations are going to die because of the overreach of this legislation. This is a shameful move in which the Internet Association has sold its soul.I know that many of the big internet companies were under lots of pressure this week from Congress over things like Russian ads, and it almost feels like this is their attempt to appease Congress, since some in Congress have (totally incorrectly) framed the SESTA debate as being one where tech companies were opposing efforts to stop sex trafficking. Since they're already fending off charges of helping foreign adversaries undermine elections, perhaps they felt they didn't want to add bogus claims of supporting sex trafficking to the pile.But, this is a bad, bad decision. Yes, the manager's amendment is slightly better, but it's not good. It's bad for the internet. It's bad for free speech. And the fact that the Internet Association has stupidly put its stamp of approval on this is going to make it much more difficult to stop. Already Senators Blumenthal and Portman are pretending that because the Internet Association is on board, it means all of "tech" is on board. This is wrong and it's dangerous. The large members of the Internet Association may be able to survive this mess (though it will be costly) but smaller organizations are going to be harmed. And, in the end, it will do nothing to stop sex trafficking, and could even make the problem worse.
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