![]() ![]() ![]() The sweet smell of advertising money, that’s why. Why would somebody want to put up videos of police arrests? People with mental illness, people in domestic violence situations do we really want to have to put that video out on YouTube for people? I think that's pushing it a little bit. Strachan’s colleague, Poulsbo Police Chief Al Townsend, echoes that sentiment: What it really comes down to is: How can you have transparency and privacy? And I don't know if you can have both in a way that satisfies everybody. The budget’s there, but the willingness to put people’s private lives on display on YouTube is not, he said:ĭo you want video of the inside of people's homes that have been burglarized to be available to the public? Or an interview with a domestic violence assault victim? The site quoted another chief of police – Steve Strachan, of the Bremerton police department – who says that in spite of a hugely successful, 6-week pilot program of body-wearable video cameras that resulted in cops falling in love with the technology, it’s going to be shelved, given the public disclosure requests that have hit other Washington cities. Note that the subjects in the videos posted to date, however, are clearly depicted.Īs the Seattle news site Crosscut reports, the chief of the police department in the city of Poulsbo estimated that, with his current staff, it could take up to three years to fulfill the blanket request. ![]() The requests mean that police say they have to sift through hundreds of hours of footage that often has to be redacted to ensure privacy, including blurring faces of those being filmed or muting audio. The police are, understandably, overwhelmed. These videos are provided by police departments in Washington State via public records requests.Īs of Thursday, the site had some 75 videos up, showing, among other things, a bicyclist being pulled over because police thought he might have stolen his bike, police responding to reports of men with knives, break-ins, gasoline theft, car accidents, people being tased for not listening to cops, assaults, a mud slide, drug smoking, and an emergency phone call about a woman going into labor. I upload police dash and body camera videos. Somebody behind a new YouTube account called “Police Video Requests” has anonymously made blanket requests to police departments in the US state of Washington to hand over every second of body-wearable camera video ever recorded by police officers. ![]()
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