OPEN AUSTIN
Home > Blog > March Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap - APD Body Cameras

March Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap - APD Body Cameras

• • Edit this post

Body Cams in Austin

For our March Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup, we invited Kathy Mitchell, from the Texas Electronic Privacy Coalition, to give a presentation on Police Body Cameras and the technology, laws, and advocacy opportunities surrounding their implementation at the Austin Police Department.

Here are the slides that Kathy provided.

A key point of Kathy’s presentation was that simply having body cams on police officers does not automatically equal transparency. The current state law that provides funding and the legal framework for body cams incentivizes law enforcement agencies to adopt body cameras, but to not make the data public.

An innovative idea is to create an opt-in option for citizens that become the subject of police body cam recordings. This would allow the public to access those recordings with the consent of the recorded subject who has either had a really poor experience with the police, a really good interaction, or something in between.

Kathy asked Open Austin members what they would like to see in a Body Cam Open Data Policy. Members recognized that release of all camera footage would be troubling for privacy reasons, but metadata like geospatial information and length of recordings could be a valuable analysis tool.

Particpate in upcoming body cam actions

To get involved with this issue, we encourage you to sign up for our body cam listserv and/or volunteer for a working group by filling out this form. http://goo.gl/forms/QN5vZejo2P

More Resources

Keep up with our future events and join our Meetup group to RSVP.

Also feel free to check out our calendar.

Ready to start working with us? Join us on Slack now or check out our Github Idea repo.