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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as a staunch privacy advocate, this is a very positive article. Police should indeed wear these cameras, and any interaction that occurs off camera should be viewed by courts with suspicion. No longer will 'confessions' rely on the memory of the officer; no longer will complaints become a "criminal's word against the officer". This is a very very good thing.

Note that it is not a violation of anyone's privacy. Police interactions with the public cannot be private, with the only exception being undercover police work or other times when the identity of the other person must be protected as in the case of a minor. These cameras can and will prevent petty (and egregious) abuses of power that American police have grown used to getting away with. Right now there are insufficient safeguards against police misconduct, and ubiquitious cameras would be a good step toward making those safeguards sufficient.

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There are a few other situations in which the privacy of citizens is at risk with this tech. As the article notes:

Privacy advocates worry that video of police officers searching a suspect’s home could end up on the evening news.

But I agree with the ACLU, as quoted later in the article, that:

“[The cameras] do raise privacy concerns, but ones that can be addressed by strong privacy policies.”

I nevertheless agree that on-duty police officers should have no expectation of privacy except in cases of undercover work. And frankly, with the multitude of undercover operations that border on entrapment, maybe those operations need to be documented better as well.

The solution there is to take all the DRM technology that has been used to block fair use, and repurpose it to enforce citizen privacy: Block the ability of ordinary officers to pull video data off the cameras. They can only transfer it to the police video-backup server, which will only allow it to be watched on special viewing stations. Give the police chief a key that lets the video out, when necessary.

The Crest advocate, Selena Parmenter, is in her early thirties if appearances can be trusted, and she acts bored. She has said little to Mary as they wait for the deputy district director of Seattle Oversight, the honorable Clarens Lodge, to take his seat and listen to their appeals.

Oversight was created in the teens. The first states to use the procedure were California and Washington. With so much information on citizens recorded daily by vid, home monitors, fibe and satlink uploads, and neighborhood surveillance systems, a separate branch of the judiciary was established to hear appeals from those seeking to use that information for legal purposes.

Early abuses--and the far worse systematic abuse under the Raphkind presidency--has made the system painfully complex for all concerned. Each avenue of information has been wrapped in labyrinthine rules of legal engagement; and an appeal for release of data can be made only once a year for any given case.

    -- Slant, Greg Bear

this is poetically brilliant!

I agree, but I don't think this obviates the need for regular citizens' videotaping the police. If surveillance is going to be omnipresent, I think it's crucial that regular people are able to present their viewpoints as well.

If we rely solely on the recordings that are produced by the powerful, it seems all too likely that things will be presented out of context, recordings will be 'lost', etc

Also, having a second recording reduces the possibility of video tampering. ("The video clearly shows the perp had a gun.")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4obTZV2QEM (jump to 1:33)

I would assume (read: hope) that both defense and prosecution would have access to the entire taped incident. And if the taping were lost that the benefit of doubt would go to the civilian, not the officer.

Yeah because that's how it works now when a cop says one thing and an accused perp says another and there's no videotape.

Please don't be naïve.

The difference is that if there was supposed to be a video, and the video went missing while in the sole custody of the police, it is a reasonable inference that the video went missing because it supports the defendant's version of events rather than the police version.

Indeed--this is a standard evidentiary rule (and jury instruction) in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. In a criminal case, it would be enough to throw out the case, with prejudice. In a civil case, the judge would even be within his authority to issue a finding of fact against the party that "lost" the video.

The lack of tape needs to be large suspicion factor. Example: when Nixon couldn't explain the "missing 18 minutes" of tape [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes#The_18....

I was in traffic court last week and a guy was there fighting a ticket he got for impeding traffic. According to the cop, the guy was stopped in the middle of the road and did not pull off the road when asked.

According to the guy, he was stopped because there was traffic in front of him, and pulled over after the light turned green and the cars blocking him in cleared out.

The guy (a casually dressed minority with tattoos all over his arms and neck) seemed frustrated as hell when all the cop did was was to simply tell the judge "I didn't see anyone in front of him" over and over as the guy tried to explain his side of the story. The ruling: guilty as charged.

I don't know what the truth was, but it sure would have been nice if there was videotape to see who was lying. As it was, it was the cop's word against the word of a guy who looked like it would be all to easy to declare him guilty.

It's pretty hard to win a traffic ticket. I've never seen the judge side with the civilian on a traffic case, and I've seen about 25 cases.

Trial by declaration is the way to go. I've won 3/4 tickets that I've gotten since I began driving, and I've won multiple for others.

Where do you live that you've been handed out so many tickets?

There are law firms that specialize in greasing the right cogs. They are usually reasonable in their fees.

I think the initial sense of disapproval comes from the connotation we usually associate with cameras: things that watch us in order to regulate our behavior.

But in this case, it is the cops who are being watched. As you note, "any interaction that occurs off camera" will be suspicious...aficionados of irony can recognize how this turns the cop-favorite-notion of "if you're doing nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?"

And the digital/systematic nature of the cameras' operation makes it even more pervasive to the officer. It's not just what you saw, but...why were you looking there, of all places? Why is your camera off during a time that you're supposed to have it on?

One thing I would've liked to see in the OP is to know the change in absolute number of officer initiated stops. If you know you have this extra layer of scrutiny to deal with, you may decide to not harass someone who is just barely breaking the law.

I'm wondering out loud, what would the repercussions, from a behavioral standpoint be, if everyone wore something like google glass. Would almost everyone turn into "law"-abiding persons? Would that even be desirable? I'm sure drunk, or otherwise in an altered state of mind, people would still act quite unruly. But what would the effect be on regular people? Would it be mostly chilling, or a kind of werdly pleasant place where people act nice because getting away with "unlawful behavior" would be much more difficult? Gone would be some adolescent rites of passage...

It could become the ultimate case of people policing each other (in the sinister neighborhood watch committees sense --ala Cuba, Vietnam, etc.)

In modern America we have this outlandish idea that it is a fine thing to "be ourselves" to the limits of the law out in public.

More traditional etiquettes include the concept of what happens in public following different rules from what happens in private. "I do not care as long as he does not scare the horses in the street" is the old saying. Just do not cause other people hassles, please. (This has a dark aspect, too, overlooking domestic violence hidden behind closed doors, but that is not important to the question on hand.)

If we move to a world where your public behavior might be displayed to your family and co-workers, I think that will be a good thing overall. If you want to misbehave, please keep it in private locales.

I like Heinlein's use of this in "For Us, The Living", he breaks out the Public and Private spheres and addresses how anything done in the private sphere is effectively heavily tabooed to inquire about, and could even become a criminal penalty. Politicians having a much smaller private sphere of course.

The flip side is some behaviours might gain wider acceptance...

I anticipate allowing undercover cops to go unrecorded will prompt police departments to make all cops undercover. To better serve the public of course.

I think any authority that accepts money from the public should be obligated to surveil themselves. Not just cops, but federal, state, and local regulators as well. What you do on the public's dime should be publicly available, with an API to your speech and location.

In Texas, at least, police can't pull you over in a car that doesn't say "Police". I suppose they could have plainclothes officers drive the "stealth" cars with their decals in reflective light gray, so long as they still would be "undercover" under the wording of the policy/laws.

Houston is way ahead of you. I don't live there anymore, but circa 06-08 they introduced dodge charger cop cars with 'ghost' paint, which is basically only visible if you're parallel with the car. they're primarily used for traffic enforcement, always assumed that it was just to increase revenue at the cost of reducing speeding deterrence, but from your comment it looks like they're threading that loophole nicely.

Pic: http://www.stcofhouston.org/PoliceCarPhotos/Houston_Police_G...

Article: http://m.policemag.com/blogpost/1474/houston-pd-s-traffic-en...

Unrelated: I had no idea police had a magazine.

Does anyone make e-paper/transflective vehicle signage yet? I'm sure it'd pay for itself in seized assets fairly quickly :)

Maybe some very corrupt departments would try to pull this, but it sounds like the cameras are a boon for cops too. Fewer complaints, fewer lawsuits, more cooperative suspects, and less time in court. What's not to like?

Do you like pervasive surveillance?

Honestly, if I'm walking down the street and I see a cop, I tend to ... behave ... better. (Not that I go around looking for trouble or anything.) If there's a cop watching, it doesn't really matter to me whether or not he's got a camera on his glasses; either way, I'm being watched.

If this cuts down on police abuse (and other wasteful crap), then I'd say the pluses outweigh the minuses.

>Honestly, if I'm walking down the street and I see a cop, I tend to ... behave ... better.

If you weren't breaking the law, then that's not what I would call a good thing.

>If there's a cop watching, it doesn't really matter to me whether or not he's got a camera on his glasses; either way, I'm being watched.

Right, at least with the camera, there is less chance for the officer to make a mistake, or lie.

>If this cuts down on police abuse (and other wasteful crap), then I'd say the pluses outweigh the minuses.

I would agree. The point of my earlier comment was to imply that all policemen may not welcome the 'intrusion'.

It's not pervasive if each cop has a camera recording - the cameras are in the same places as cops. Plus if they record only in the case of interactions with members of the public then it's even less "pervasive".

Yes, actually. I know my opinion is unpopular in communities such as HN, but I am actually in favor of mass surveillance. Though I find the lack of oversight at the NSA completely unacceptable.

When I was doing a politics startup and people asked me if we'd make a mobile app, my standard response was that the only mobile app I wanted was something that would continuously track and report politicians' coordinates.

I'm most interested in the application to SWAT teams and how that will or won't impact their increasing militarization and general overuse of force. It'll be interesting to see how much resistance there is (I'd expect a lot) to making SWAT teams wear them.

As long as those video feeds get stored by someone else than the police, or at least that police department, otherwise certain video feeds could easily be "misplaced" or "corrupted".

Still though this is not a checks and balances approach. It's a covering you butt approach. True reform would include third party oversight, not just internal investigations.

As long as citizens have a right to un-tampered feeds from their own cameras, too.

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