I’m curious to hear your opinions on the matter of officers muting their BWC when talking to other officers (or just in general). It seems to only cause a negative outlook from the public on a situation anytime a questionable arrest or something similar happens especially when the supervisor/SGT demands the BWC be muted as he engages in verbal communication with the responding officer.
An example of this happening would be this situation:
https://youtu.be/CQayd-T7q68?si=qByRe_wFRbaCUOgd
Comments
Ours don’t mute. If sensitive information needs to be shared, our tech guys can and do redact it from the audio before releasing it after a records request. If you’re doing something that needs recorded on video, I can’t offhand think of a reason you wouldn’t also record the audio.
Better than shutting the camera off to talk to one another.
Muting for officer conference is fine, maybe someone wants to ask if he finally ate that girls ass he’s been trying to for a month on a bullshit neighbor dispute but he hasn’t seen him at all during the day
It depends on when and why it’s muted and what the agency policy says. We’re allowed to mute them to discuss certain things away from any citizens, but they should be unmuted as soon as that discussion is over.
I know my agency (and I’m sure it was pretty common in other agencies) where officers would mute their camera to discuss something with a supervisor or something and then forget to unmute afterwards and it caused some problems with criminal cases and some IA investigations. There was nothing intentional or malicious about not unmuting, but we’re human and sometimes mistakes happen.
When we upgraded to newer cameras we can only mute by continuously holding down the mute button so unmuting isn’t a problem anymore.
State law and department policy (possibly settings) mandate if this is permissible.
When we were researching this around 2012 there was a great debate back and forth and officers wanted the ability to have offline conversations with other people (Sgt, Capt, Peers) while a call was going on that may or may not have anything to do with the call and/or arrest. The agency had pre and post event timers set on all officer recorded video, so without enabling a mute option, they couldn’t go offline. The decision was made to allow it with a stern policy (to coincide with state law) that it couldn’t be muted in the presence of the outside involved parties (arrest/victim). If you were the third officer on a call and the scene was stabilized, suddenly your kids’ school calls you, which is unusual and usually means a problem. You step away from the involved parties, mute it, and answer the phone. It is just one of many examples where it is proper and reasonable to mute the camera. There were already precedents regarding this on In-Vehicle cameras going back many, many years.
Ours don’t have a mute function
People are just nosey.