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Comment by jeffehobbs | Hacker News Reader

Better than nothing, however?

Not really. The article states two huge downsides:

1) Privileged footage access by the police results in selective publication of parts of the video, creating false or distorted narratives;

2) Police cameras are cameras, so this results in increased surveillance.

I dont get number 2. There's already a police officer where the camera is, they themselves are surveillance. Id much prefer the camera. Especially if I did something wrong so it can be seen exactly what I did instead of the report being blown out of proportion to ensure the charges stick.

There exists no computer in the world that can combine the memory of hundred of thousands of police officers together. With video footage, that's not necessarily true.

Right, but what about all the times that crimes aren't being committed? In Illinois, the law is that the cameras must be able to record 10 hours and must be on when not in the car or the officer is talking with a victim, witness or confidential informant and those individuals request the camera be turned off [0]. That means that whenever the office enters a private area, where one expects a reasonable amount of privacy, that privacy is gone as long as the officer if following the rules. There are, of course, private places that one would not expect privacy such as any business that states they are recording video.

[0] http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs4.asp?ActID=3662&Ch...

Well, no, because they cost money. Every $1 spent on buying and maintaining useless cameras is $1 not spent on actual policing.

>Every $1 spent on buying and maintaining useless cameras is $1 not spent on actual policing.

So, much better than nothing?

If you dream of a Utopian land without police officers, I hear Somalia is gorgeous this time of year.

Oh, just fewer. There’s probably less LE per capita in Scandinavia than there are in Somalia.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen..., Somalia has roughly the same number of police officers per capita as Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and South Korea.

I was curious about it, so I looked at the underlying data and fixed the numbers on the wikipedia page based on the latest UN data available. Based on that, the number of police per capita is actually considerably lower.

Welp, I've lost the point, but human knowledge has improved. I'll count that as an overall win?

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