There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly.
It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.
It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.
If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition.
In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.
if the cops bust into your house because they misread the address of the warrant (something which happens regularly), and they capture some video of you walking around eating cereal naked, do you think that should immediately and irrevocably go up on youtube?
And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being public if I'm the victim.
How about we stop allowing police to search homes in the first place in 99.9% of cases?
Ok. I'm not.
(Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.)
Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.
That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
They are both emergency responses and require tremendous amount of material and human resources to get there very fast.
Police have the fastest cars with the brightest lights that let them go wherever they want the fastest (Bonus if they have a motorcycle, but those they keep to give speeding tickets for some reason). It also means they are the first ones there and might need to do CPR from time to time or help that guy about to jump down the bridge.
>Why has our society conflated those?
We are imperfect humans in an imperfect world. We can't assign every single task to a different human being. We, as a society, accept that.
>The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
There is a big difference between secrecy of the police and privacy of the policed.
Go watch Live PD and come tell me seriously they should stop censoring the names, date of birth, addresses, plate numbers, SSN, wardrobe malfunctions of the victims, witnesses and children that appear in the show.
They take the time to protect the privacy of the bystanders, but it costs money and an incredible amount of resource to do so just for a couple of teams for a couple of hours a week and they don't even do a perfect job.
I get it. Most of us are programmers, so we think we can setup a pretty solid set of rules for when something applies. Maybe some of us can. And when that perfect ruleset is found, it will be awesome. However, it is a lot more fluid and discretion is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's not that black and white but it's not that complex of an issue either.
Act - https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable..., White Paper - https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right...
Honestly, privacy is nearly dead anyway. I'm not happy about it but there are databases with enough information on us to steal anyone's identity. With that level of information already existing... it seems kind of silly that what we're most worried about with police cameras basically comes down to embarrassment.
It's also weird how hacker news has forgotten that Google Street View has tons of pictures of naked people with automatically blurred faces. Same for Google Maps/Earth.
As another poster said, this is solvable. Just will require more than a few rules.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/washington-s...
Someone's husband falsely but convincingly accuses them of domestic abuse, later they are cleared of all charges. Does this accusation go on youtube?
Someone attempted suicide, and then called the cops because he didn't want to go through with it.
Someone was inadvertently caught on camera in a gay bar when it was raided for drugs.
Video of the arrest goes viral. Hundreds of millions of people across the world see it.
You are later acquited of the charges. But a fat lot of good that does....