Today, uniformed police typically carry an assortment of sophisticated weapons and defensive gear. They are highly trained in the use of each instrument and in personal confrontation tactics. Patrol and investigative officers are aided greatly by modern surveillance technology.

FirstNet officials explain that the system will give local command centers greater ability to manage emergency situations. At the same time, it will integrate with regional and national operations centers as needed. In short, FirstNet is foreseen as “a single platform for public safety communications.”

COLLIER COUNTY, Fla.  — A sheriff’s office’s drone unit was key to locating a missing 77-year-old man.

According to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, the man, who suffers from health and mental challenges, was already missing for two hours when police were contacted on April 17.

The agency’s Drone Operations Unit divided the search and deployed six drones to find the missing man. 

Drone Pilot Cpl. Harley Terrill was able to locate the man through a canopy of trees. Police immediately responded to the man’s location where he was found safely and returned home.

The rescue was the first time a drone led the sheriff’s office’s rescue.

In September 2014, surveillance footage showed a group of “clean cut 20-somethings” using gay slurs and beating two men who had been walking down the street in Philadelphia. The victims both went to the hospital with serious injuries. Thankfully the Philadelphia Police Department posted the surveillance video of the attack on social media to collect information.

Only a few hours later, an anonymous Philadelphia Twitter user who regularly posts about sports had found the alleged perpetrators only through social media. The user was able to find the name of a nearby restaurant and the names of young men who had “checked-in” there. Less than a month later, three suspects were charged with the crime and are currently being tried for the attack.

In the Northside of Cincinnati, a gang called the “Taliband” was a regular part of criminal activity. In 2008, police began checking into the social media profiles of known gang members. Then the police teamed up with the University of Cincinnati’s Institute of Crime Science and began creating databases of information taken from social media networks.

By combining this information with existing police and phone records, they were able to gain far more information about crimes. The gang members were regularly bragging about events on social media, and police officers used this to their advantage. A nine-month investigation precipitated 71 arrests, including the arrests of key gang members. While the gang still operates, the actions taken by police severely hampered gang operations.

After 34 years, a stabbing victim was identified through social media in March 2015. The Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office created a Facebook page for the cold case in February, featuring a reconstructive composite drawing of what the female victim might have looked like.

Just days after launching the page, the family of Carol Ann Cole contacted the police department. Police had found a woman’s body in the woods on January 28, 1981. She had been stabbed multiple times. With the name “D. Davies” written on her shoes, the police almost exclusively assumed that was related to her name. But thanks to the social media page, Cole’s family members can finally gain some peace on what happened to their missing relative.

 

Research reveals that United States and UK video surveillance methods seem to have worked as a means of preventing crime.

The party proposing video surveillance footage in court must ascertain how the video was recorded, what influence the recording process had on the documented video, whether the transporting of the video deposition compromised the reliability of the footage and if all important video has been acquired of the episode in question. Consequently, video evidence must be above-board in order to gain credibility in court.

Certain essentials in the law of evidence must always be considered when utilizing digital video images:

The digitally recorded documentation is an honest and precise likeness of what the supporter of the data declares it to be.

There should be a structured agency policy for evidence compilation and maintenance that incorporates digital and electronic evidence such as computer data and emails.

Proving that the alleged evidence is applicable and to what degree it influences the probability of that fact. Normally, if the evidence passes the initial three-steps, admissibility is assured.

In addition, with the growth in video surveillance at trial, there has been a small amount of difficulties with admissibility of vehicle-mounted dashboard-cameras. Adhering to typical sequence of evidence protocol such as where the video originated from, how it was recorded, who maintained the equipment, leads to admissibility. Nonetheless, dilemmas with dashboard-cameras do happen; however, they are generally technical issues like electric surges and power dumps that can cause loss of video image.

There are so many things that come into play when using video surveillance as evidence in court. One thing is for sure, it’s here to stay. In fact, studies reveal that when juries are presented with surveillance footage, the suspect is more likely to receive a conviction than if no video surveillance was used at all. However, it is not enough to bring video evidence to court and setup as if its entertainment. Juries need to “get it” and to make sure that they do, the video must be clarified by one or several qualified professional witnesses.

The best and most charitable thing the BPD can say about these videos is that they do not depict evidence being planted, but “merely” searches being recreated without disclosing that fact. But even that is both a violation of BPD policies and of at least three different criminal statutes— those against obstruction of justice, impairment of evidence, and making false statements to public officials concerning crime.

 

The fact that the officers have not yet been criminally or administratively charged is itself not just a travesty, but further evidence of the deep, systemic problems with accountability in this agency. Even if they don’t suspect the even more serious crime of planting evidence, why wouldn’t they charge the crimes that are right in front of all of our faces right now: manufacturing evidence they knew would be introduced in court to put someone in jail? And, immediately charge the officers with violating departmental policies?

 

If officers want to re-stage finding evidence, they have to be honest about it. Imagine that I as an ACLU lawyer have a case I’m bringing in Federal Court, in which an email from a government official to my client is relevant evidence, but my client deleted it. Do you think if I created a copy of that deleted email and presented it to the court without acknowledging my recreation, that I would have a job, and wouldn’t be charged with a crime? I sure don’t. So why is it okay for a cop to do that? On what planet is that okay?

The reality that police officers assigned to wear body cameras will quickly begin to, as I have discussed, think about cameras that are on, play to the camera, and work to shape the photographic record, and how this may have important consequences for policing. This is not the first case in which officer reenactments for the video record have been claimed. 

The existence of officer control over activation is a central reason for public mistrust of body camera programs, and addressing it through good policy and robust enforcement is absolutely critical to ensuring that these programs have public trust and legitimacy.  BPD’s failure to enforce the policy in these cases, in the face of flagrant violations that are right in front of our eyes, and which have already had significant public safety consequences, is an abject failure of leadership and accountability, and suggests that the public’s mistrust was well-founded.

“The department, although a little reluctant to jump in at first, has seen that it protects their members well,” Commissioner William Evans recently told City Council members.

“Recent incidents only go to confirm that body cameras can serve as accountability, not only for officers but the community as well,” she said during a council hearing last week.

“The video from the body-cam . . . was extremely helpful to the court, in ruling on defendants’ motion,” Byrne, the judge, wrote in agreeing to dismiss proof of an unlicensed gun in a case in October 2017.

In that case, the judge said the video’s portrayal of “the events as they unfolded” confirmed the defense lawyers’ constitutional claims of privacy. The lawyers argued police had no cause to frisk two black men who were seen sitting in a parked car in Dorchester and to search their car, in spite of the officers’ suspicion that the car was parked a block away from the scene of a shooting moments earlier.

The men did not live on the street, the officers noted. One of them had clothes matching the description of a suspect. The judge said that did not matter.