No.
Problem #1 is unfair and biased prosecution. If every time someone smokes a blunt, the police get alerted, but only minorities are actually arrested and prosecuted, that's bullshit.
Problem #2 is that not every crime should be punished, period. Nobody is harmed if I walk across a street without waiting for a green light.
Problem #3 is that every crime being captured means that literally every citizen has a backlog of blackmail material waiting for them that the government could use to pressure them for one reason or another. Commit a more serious crime, and you could be pressured into a plea bargain in exchange for not bringing the others to bear. Speak up against an unpopular policy the government is trying to push, and suddenly you're being arrested for something that happened three years ago.
No thanks. This would be a nightmare world.
However, just as a thought experiment, wouldn't total surveillance actually help stop #1?
If there existed video proof of illegal bias, it could be targeted and stopped, vs now, where you just have to imagine that all groups are committing crimes at the same rate and police are only focusing on minorities.
How would it? Prosecutors decide who to prosecute based on available evidence. It's systematic societal bias (and obviously, personal bias, too.)
But it's not like video surveillance would show anything new - we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists.
You answered your own question!
> we already have statistics on which groups get sent to jail over minor crimes, and which ones get slaps on wrists
I think you will find those statistics correlate almost exactly to income and only overlap race because there is also a correlation between income and race in the US.
So without video that is hard evidence of actual racism (eg. arresting blacks and ignoring whites committing the same crime) we have to do a two-step mental trick to get to the racism. Poor people that are arrested can't afford lawyers (or good lawyers) and have worse outcomes. Black people tend to be poorer than Whites, so the courts are racist!
I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof (ie. video that could be counted and compared to outcomes), not just correlational proof that involves a lot of other noise that may or may not be racism or that is a couple of steps removed.
> You answered your own question!
The point is that they don't have to prosecute everyone. It's hard to not see this as a willful misunderstanding of my point.
> a two-step mental trick
Just what I'm thinking, but mirrored, actually.
> I believe it would be a different case altogether if you had "actual" direct proof
I think some people will never be convinced. Also, I'm going to stop responding to this thread. Without direct video proof, there's no way to prove the two are related.
You'll quickly learn that people would vote for a totalitarian authoritarian fascist state with constant surveillance and instant death penalties if it meant eliminating the risk of their Amazon package being stolen from their porch, or their car being broken into.
But you also have to remember that there are good crimes and bad laws, there are bad cops and bad use of force and general abuse of power. Would you want to give them more power, give up a possibility to organize and fight against anything in public?
Furthermore, there's no guarantee that the information gathered with all of this surveillance will remain in the hands of "the good guys". In addition to abuse by corrupt or malicious police, administrators, and politicians who may legally get access to this data, the data can be leaked to or stolen by all sorts of criminals, stalkers, bullies, abusers, pedophiles, etc.
Just about every week there's a new story about a massive data leak. It seems unlikely that data collected through mass surveillance will stay out of the wrong hands forever.
How many parents would willingly broadcast to the world the path their child takes to school, their schedule, and photos of their kids. How many people would willingly allow live streaming of their family's bedrooms and bathrooms? All of this surveillance could potentially prevent or solve crime, but most people still have some sense of privacy left, and a concern about ways information about them and their loved ones could be misused -- even if they don't think about it deeply or very often.
Unless, of course, they or people they know have been victims of harassment, stalking, identity theft, and other abuses of data collected about them. In which case they probably think about it much more.
Several already have, working with Palantir and Amazons Rekognition. LA, Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Tampa and probably more.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2019/05/amazons-...
It's not entirely unlikely that these kind of system level effects, or something similar is why - well intended - efforts regularly end up "tyrannical" in nature after a while.
One argument goes roughly like this: If something exists, persistently, it is likely to have one or several strong driving forces. If you apply enough counter force in a single direction you get a "buckling" behavior as soon as you completely overwhelm the principal drivers. Now the opposing forces, known to be existing from previous behavior, will be almost entirely unopposed/undamped, and together with the introduced factor come to completely dominate the system.
Thus long term stability might only be achievable by small, relatively slow, iterative changes that slowly chane the often vast number of driving forces, and their opposing forces, in relative synchronicity.
A wholesale prevention of crime in public places would likely be such a factor, and while I can't predict the outcome, it's almost certainly going to be disastrous. Criminal activity is driven by extremely strong forces, some of them likely related almost purely to, potentially misdirected, survival instincts.
As noted elsewhere, when football hooligans had cameras installed to identify them, they scouted out locations where there was not surveillance. Criminals would learn to commit their crimes under the cover of a roof or awning. This would make people safer from criminals, while making them less safe from the authorities.
It would be completely unethical and punish countless law abiding citizens, but it would undoubtedly be popular. Pretty much everywhere.
If one trust the government to have a monopoly on machine guns and tanks, video cameras is my least concern if they turn evil.
Public video surveillance without audio is not that bad compared to wire taping, risk profiling etc.
The nightmare would be Google, MasterCard, Amazon or what ever running those cameras.