The Los Angeles Police Commission is investigating how half of the recording antennas in the Southeast Division went missing, seemingly as a way to evade new self-monitoring procedures that the Los Angeles Police Department imposed last year.

The antennas, which are mounted onto individual patrol cars, receive recorded audio captured from an officer’s belt-worn transmitter. The transmitter is designed to capture an officer’s voice and transmit the recording to the car itself for storage. The voice recorders are part of a video camera system that is mounted in a front-facing camera on the patrol car. Both elements are activated any time the car’s emergency lights and sirens are turned on, but they can also be activated manually.

According to the Los Angeles Times, an LAPD investigation determined that around half of the 80 patrol cars in one South LA division were missing antennas as of last summer, and an additional 10 antennas were unaccounted for. Citing a police source, the newspaper said that removing the antennas can reduce the range of the voice transmitters by as much as a third of the normal operating distance.

The Police Commission, an independent body that oversees LAPD policy, was only notified of the situation two months ago. Neither the commission nor the LAPD immediately responded for comment.

"On an issue like this, we need to be brought in right away," commission President Steve Soboroff told the Times. "This equipment is for the protection of the public and of the officers. To have people who don't like the rules to take it upon themselves to do something like this is very troubling."

The self-monitoring had been imposed by the LAPD as the result of federal monitoring of its police activities that formally ended last year after more than a decade.

An LAPD spokesperson, Cmdr. Andrew Smith, told the Times that new rules since last fall require patrol officers to account for both antennas at the beginning and end of every shift, with additional unannounced spot checks. Since then, only one antenna has gone missing.

Oh, the irony

Sid Heal, a recently retired commander who evaluated technology during his decades-long tenure at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, reiterated an obvious point: "No one likes to be monitored," he noted by e-mail.

Meanwhile, Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, lamented the LAPD's actions but said he understood them.

"First, it’s fascinating but entirely understandable that the police don’t like being watched," he told Ars by e-mail. "Maybe they worry about their actions being taken the wrong way by their superiors. Maybe they worry that worrying about being watched distracts them from their jobs. Maybe they might have something to hide, but the wide spread of this phenomenon suggests that they just don’t like being watched. (But it’s interesting and ironic that those who watch us to stop us from breaking things themselves broke things so they wouldn’t be watched!)"

"Second, it shows that the police, just like all of us, react viscerally to being watched all the time. Pervasive surveillance of this sort makes us jittery and distracted; it’s stressful as we all need times and places—even during the work day—when we can be alone and be ourselves!"

Last fall, when Boston proposed putting GPS trackers on all of its patrol cars, some officers were similarly antagonistic toward the changes.

“No one likes it. Who wants to be followed all over the place?” said one officer who spoke anonymously to the Boston Globe (department rules forbid police from speaking to the media without authorization). “If I take my cruiser, and I meet [a reluctant witness] to talk, eventually they can follow me and say, 'Why were you in a back dark street for 45 minutes?' It’s going to open up a can of worms that can’t be closed.”