Watching the Police: Will Two-Way Surveillance Reduce Crime? 309
An anonymous reader writes "As surveillance technologies have matured in both their sophistication and usage, some are starting to ask the question: is it time we start using them to watch the watchers? The proliferation of dashboard cameras has reduced liability costs, provided valuable evidence, and made police officers safer. The next progression would naturally be for the camera to move out of the car and onto the officer's uniform itself. In The Verge appears a fascinating report about the company behind the non-lethal stun guns that have become commonplace around the world, Taser International, which has set out to transform policing once again – this time, with Axon Flex, a head-mounted camera with a twelve-hour battery life that officers can use to record interactions. The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen. Footage is then uploaded to a cloud-based service where it can be accessed by the police department. It includes an audit trail to reveal who has accessed the information and when."
Just say'in (Score:5, Interesting)
The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen.
But not when beating the citizen? Or violating his rights?
Re:Just say'in (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, that's exactly what that means. When they say "constantly on" they mean "knows when to turn itself off if ya know what I mean."
It was predicted 20 years ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Strangely, the scenarios presented were placed 20 years in the future. Posted in 1993, then-revolutionary Wired Magazine got it exactly, dead on. [wired.com] It's almost strange how they were so dead-on as far as the time scale.
Notice all the dash cam footage coming out of the Soviet Union...
Re:The ONLY Way this should work is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why NOT up the ante? Police blotters SHOULD be Public Information. Why should be video be any different?
If someone makes a false accusation, they always were making it publically by telling a cop. In this case, the accusation would be not only public knowledge, but the stakes would be so much higher. If you lie to a cop, you are making not only a false official statement, but you are making a documented false statement. If that is proven to be false, then the party that is lied upon can hang you out to dry.
The exceptions to government transparency laws MUST be very few and only in very specific instances.
What government reveals should never be driven by what people want or don't want exposed, public policy should ALWAYS be driven by the fact that government MUST be (enforceably so) transparent.
i.e. If private info shouldn't be revealed, then public policy should be crafted so that the Government doesn't get it.
Re:The ONLY Way this should work is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or strategically moving to a location where the camera can't see. For example, look up the dashboard footage of the shooting of John T Williams in Seattle: SPD officer Ian Burke sees Williams committing the heinous crime of walking across a street, yells at him to stop, leaves the camera frame, and then shoots Williams 4 times in the back and side. In the ensuing investigation, Burke successfully claimed self defense and avoided all criminal responsibility, even though he was the only person at the scene who did anything remotely violent. This even though the eyewitnesses (including one that courageously confronted Burke immediately) said that Williams presented no danger to them or to Burke.
Re:Crime isn't what concerns me (Score:4, Interesting)
But what if I don't want my interaction with a police officer recorded? What if I'm telling him about the drug dealer down the street and would rather that guy not find out who was talking to the cops? Or maybe a cop regularly comes in and shoots-the-shit with me in my retail business. All of that would be recorded? It's good for cops to have that kind of casual relationship with people along their beat. It's not good that those people would be concerned that everything they said to the cop gets recorded
I'm absolutely a general proponent of the idea of recording police at work. It works great for car-mounted situations, because it's rare that dash cams would record the kind of citizen interactions I'd be worried about having recorded. But unless there is some way to mitigate my concerns, I believe recording day-to-day officer interactions would do more harm than good.