Body Cameras need activation

 Richard Hylton

From:	Richard Hylton <rhylton@san.rr.com>
Sent:	Friday, October 14, 2022 1:08 PM
To:	'Tehanita.taylor@sfgov.org'; 'brian.cox@SFGOV.ORG'
Cc:	Nancy Beninati
Subject:	FW: Public Defender Says Police Body-Worn Camera Shows Evidence of Racial Bias During Traffic Stop. At least they recorded this one.  RE: Abuse of Police Body Cameras as evidence- suppression tools

Lady and Gentleman,

 

As Public Defenders, doubtless you would be interested in these things. On reading what the officer said, I recalled Jack

Black’s “that is how I roll.”

 

 

"This is race-based policing. The officer tells us that that's the way he practices. He tells us that it happens to him and there's nothing he can do about it because that's the way police in San Diego act."

Abe Genser, San Diego County Public Defender

 

From: Richard Hylton <rhylton@san.rr.com> 

Sent: Friday, October 14, 2022 12:14 PM

To: Nancy Beninati <Nancy.Beninati@doj.ca.gov>; 'AB953' <AB953@doj.ca.gov>

Cc: 'jenniferh@auditor.ca.gov' <jenniferh@auditor.ca.gov>; 'AUD City Auditor' <CityAuditor@sandiego.gov>; cityattorney@sandiego.gov; 'AB953' <AB953@doj.ca.gov>; Nancy Beninati <Nancy.Beninati@doj.ca.gov>;

'mayortoddgloria@sandiego.gov' <mayortoddgloria@sandiego.gov>; 'Jordon, Jeffrey' <jjordon@pd.sandiego.gov>; 'Claire Trageser' <CTRAGESER@kpbs.org>; 'Audra Opdyke' <Audra.Opdyke@doj.ca.gov>; Jennifer Campbell <JenniferCampbell@SanDiego.gov>; Joe LaCava <JoeLaCava@SanDiego.Gov>; monicamontgomery@sandiego.gov; vivianMoreno@SanDiego.gov

Subject: Public Defender Says Police Body-Worn Camera Shows Evidence of Racial Bias During Traffic Stop. At least they recorded this one. RE: Abuse of Police Body Cameras as evidence- suppression tools

 

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/investigations/nbc-7-investigates-san-diego-man-first-in-county-to-use-ca-racialjustice-act-in-effort-to-dismiss-case/3067159/

 

It was NBC 7, using a doctored dataset provided by SDPD IT, that first published the “finding” that Blacks resist arrest 10 times the rate of other groups (“good” data say 6 times as often.) Perhaps, with this NBC 7 is seeking redemption through good works. It will take a lot more than this.

 

All this and the below are inextricably connected or interwoven with claims of Black pathologies that produce the disparities that these people either deny or claim does not mean what the dictionary defines. I speak specifically of Uses-of-force and the claim that they result from resistance: which resistance, according to the San Diego City Auditor, by implication, is substantially unrecorded by body cameras; up to 40% unrecorded.

 

For almost three years these SDPD people have claimed that Blacks resist arrest or obstruct officers at ungodly rates. As said above, SDPD began by using a doctored dataset, results of which were published unvalidated by NBC 7. Last year, they went further. They enlisted Center for Policing Equity, which entity offered partial support to the claim, while recognizing defects in data, but offering no support for the conclusions that were widely published and have a place of prominence on San Diego’s website. 

 

Now recently came the City Auditor, whose analysis is a spectacular thing. It has more calls for service that were not captured on body-cams, than were ever reported under RIPA. According to the auditor up to 40% of all encounters were unrecorded. As confounding as it is, it also means that up to 40% of the  incidents of belligerent Blacks resisting arrest were not recorded either. Moreover, for the explanations that came out of Nisleit to be true, he would have had to rescind Shelley Zimmerman’s policies and adopted the ridiculousness that has been proven not to capture required evidence.

 

I do not believe most of this. I hold that biased-policing is being given a hefty assist by biased-reporting and these dear people are trying to back into plausible explanations. What it also means is that RIPA Reports are mostly nonsense; more or less what audits by Inspectors General and Auditors in San Diego, Los Angeles County, City of Los Angeles and Oakland have found.

 

These people say anything, but data is king.

 

 

From: Richard Hylton <rhylton@san.rr.com> 

Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2022 9:13 AM

To: 'AUD City Auditor' <CityAuditor@sandiego.gov>; cityattorney@sandiego.gov

Cc: 'jenniferh@auditor.ca.gov' <jenniferh@auditor.ca.gov>; 'AB953' <AB953@doj.ca.gov>; Nancy Beninati

<Nancy.Beninati@doj.ca.gov>; 'mayortoddgloria@sandiego.gov' <mayortoddgloria@sandiego.gov>;

'kevin.Walker@doj.ca.gov' <kevin.Walker@doj.ca.gov>; 'Jordon, Jeffrey' <jjordon@pd.sandiego.gov>; 'Claire Trageser'

<CTRAGESER@kpbs.org>; 'Audra Opdyke' <Audra.Opdyke@doj.ca.gov>; 'Jesse Marx'

<jesse.marx@voiceofsandiego.org>; Jennifer Campbell <JenniferCampbell@SanDiego.gov>; Joe LaCava

<JoeLaCava@SanDiego.Gov>; monicamontgomery@sandiego.gov; vivianMoreno@SanDiego.gov

Subject: Abuse of Police Body Cameras as evidence- suppression tools

 

Dear Andy Hanau,

 

In the City Auditor’s oral presentation of its report to the San Diego City Council, the number of unrecorded enforcement actions of which Carissa Nash spoke numbered 243,000. It was a perplexing number on my first hearing them, so much so that I wrote to a legion about it. I am writing again, unperplexed. Carissa must be mistaken, no?

 

Almost every enforcement action, or call for service that ends in an enforcement action, must be RIPA-reported. In fact, I cannot readily remember the exclusions. Carissa said that for a 12 month period 243,000 enforcement actions were not Body Camera video-recorded. Here is a partial transcript from around 1:59:00:

 

Chris and Danielle will get into the findings and happy to take any questions thanks thanks Matt I'm Carissa Nash this senior performance audit around this project in finding one we looked at the data to see if officers were recording events they were required to record SDPD procedure requires officers to record enforcement encounters and begin recording on the way to calls that have the potential to involve them enforcement encounter we looked at the data across a years worth of incidents and found that 40% of officers dispatched to incidents are required officers to record with their body camera did not have a record of a video for that incident as shown in the chart that constitutes more than 243,000 times officers were dispatched to an incident and they were likely missing a video for it knowing that officers were missing videos 40% of the time they were dispatched to potential enforcement encounters we dug further into the data and looked at specific call types that would be clear…

 

Clarissa did not say which 12 months, so I examined every bit of data that the SDPD has made available. I regret to say that there is no period of consecutive months where the annualized count of reported stops are as many as 243,000. The embedded spreadsheet shows the results.

 

As you know or should, since you have spent some time investigating me, I have made noises about substantial defects in reported stops, forever.  What Clarissa contends is far worse than anything that I have imagined, much less claimed. What the City Auditor claims is something that severely impinges on the credibility of all that the SDPD has ever reported to the CA-DOJ/RIPA Advisory Board. 

 

It did not have to be so. I am left wondering what the CA-DOJ/RIPA Advisory Board is going to do about all this, for from using just raw numbers and a group of assumptions including that the encounters are RIPA period related, and that every RIPA- reported item was video-recorded, no less than 53,000 (243,000-189,000) actionable/reportable stops were unreported to the RIPA-Advisory Board, irrespective of the year (12 months) to which the City Auditor’s sample applies. Again this is much worse than I have asserted, before.

 

Only now am I certain why you have unlawfully chosen to ignore my lawful CPRA requests. I am equally certain, in this, as I am certain as to why there is no reliable or substantial evidence that supports the assertion that certain people in certain places resist the police, which resistance results in increased use-of-force disparities.  Substantial evidence does not exist because, as the City Auditor found, up to 40% of such actionable encounters were not recorded. At least we do have “transparency” in that.

 

Carry on. I wager that Carissa is not mistaken