Police Forces Experiment w/Cameras Mounted on Guns: Like Bodycams Cops Will Sell the Public on "Transparency" but Then Unilaterally Control "Public Video" & Use It Primarily to Convict Citizens

Yurugu’s technology provides only incidental, random benefit to Black & Brown people - it is primarily designed to help put us in greater confinement or inflict harm in a system of injustice. Like bodycams police guns with cameras mounted on them will be used mostly to convict citizens and defend cops from charges. Like bodycams liar cops will sell the public on transparency/accountability and the dependent media will parrot its bullshit. [see video above]

Legal scholars, Laurent Sacharoff and Sarah Lustbader, state, “Imagine if police departments across the nation sought funding for a new program described as follows: "We propose a video surveillance program targeted toward heavily patrolled low-income neighborhoods of color in order to gather evidence of crimes such as drug possession, vandalism, and resisting arrest. We will primarily use this evidence to prosecute criminal cases against civilians - not police officers - withholding it from defendants to encourage pleas, and allowing access only to those who take the risk of going to trial. The public and the media will rarely, if ever, gain access to these videos, and we will release them at our unilateral discretion; we will, of course, own and control all the footage." If this were the avowed purpose and description of a program, few would support it. Yet this is precisely how most police body camera programs are currently run.“

“In an often unremarked [by dependent media] development, police have taken control of body camera programs and - most damaging - they have claimed sole ownership of the videos themselves. They decide which system to buy; they determine how to configure those systems; they decide when and how to activate the cameras; they control who may have access to the videos and when; and they determine how long to keep the videos, and whether to destroy them.“

From [HERE] Amid demands for more police transparency after the killing of George Floyd, U.S. police departments are experimenting with a new way of capturing potentially deadly moments: putting small cameras on their guns.

The police department in King City, California last month became the state's first force to mandate cameras on all its officers' handguns.

"With (the) public's responses to officer-involved shootings, I really felt it was important to have that perspective of what the officer most likely can see and the best point of view to see that from is the barrel of the handgun," said Robert Masterson, King City police chief.

The cameras, about the size of a thumb, are mounted along a rail on the bottom of a firearm's barrel and automatically record when the gun is drawn from the holster.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2016, almost half of U.S. law enforcement agencies had acquired body-worn cameras. The use of gun-mounted cameras, however, is far less common and the numbers less known.

Minnesota-based Viridian Weapon Technologies, said more than 500 agencies across 47 states are in various stages of trialing or implementing its gun-camera system, which is aimed at supplementing images from police body cameras.

The gun camera was used in a case in Texas earlier this year to prosecute a suspect who became involved in a shootout with an officer in April 2019. Video from the body camera showed the officer's arms in front holding the gun, whereas video from the gun camera showed the pistol's point-of-view.

The gun camera would not be useful in cases of alleged police brutality where a gun is not drawn, and Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, warned that there were limitations to the technology,

"Even when a gun is drawn, they're not going to capture the context of events leading up to the point where the officer draws their gun and often that is the most crucial part in evaluating an officer's action and whether that was abusive or professional," he said.