Well, it's nice to dream.
The best part of them wearing a GoPro is that everyone wins: civilians get to feel much safer, and police get to show that they're not as bad as they're made out to be.
The issue arises when the cops have that introduced, and accusations of excess force drop dramatically... that sort of shows that yes, they are as bad as they're made out to be...
Would this system work for less dangerous areas? Probably. For more dangerous areas, I wouldn't want to be a police officer and have this forced upon me. Because corner cases here can be deadly.
Secondly, I very very rarely here of juries being "too hard" on police. The current culture is that most police can't be touch even if everyone knows they did it AND has evidence. In a lot of cases, they are untouchable unless their peers want to throw them under the bus or a separate, usually federal service looks into the matter.
There are people that, while wearing a camera in a dangerous situation, can remain calm, cool, and collected. If anything, that should be one of the first requirements of becoming a cop, not an argument against cameras.
In those cases the safest thing for the police to do is to withdraw to a safe location and wait for backup, which is what they're supposed to do. Engaging in the sort of aggressive behavior that could be "mischaracterized" as police brutality in response to a potentially dangerous situation only serves to escalate the situation and make it even more dangerous.
The accused have a moral right to have a jury decide what was appropriate for the officer to do in a given situation. Keeping the data private by its nature detracts from the goal of having a fair judicial system.
NB: to your read, the laws may need to be adjusted to allow officers to legally be more brutal to people who have not been convicted of crimes. That does not change the fact that police work should be able to be done in the light. Nobody benefits when police to feel like they don't have to become criminals to do their jobs.
It's true that there is a large number of bad cops--but that's simply because there are a lot cops. Most cops hold themselves to a higher standard, but never show up in the news because it's not newsworthy when a cop does his job.
Bad programmers don't have weapons and authority to kidnap people legally.
While something like that may exist in some engineering-heavy workplaces (I've heard stories but never seen it), it's nowhere near as common or institutionalized.
Which really just shows how much better cops behave when they know they're being watched and justifies complaints about their corruption.
Many of the people who deal with police on a frequent basis are skilled liars. They know how to stymie investigations by tying the officers up in paperwork. Having video evidence would prevent spurious complaints.
Fair point. However, I was a cop, and I know better than to trust cops.
That's great too! Win-win!
You would think police departments would jump at the opportunity to wear cameras for this very reason, but they have routinely fought it.
A town I lived in the cops fought dash cams for a long time saying they couldn't get enough money to install them. Finally the state supreme court stepped up and started throwing out all DUIs without dash cams and amazingly all squad cars had them installed very quickly.
Run it off beaglebone or rasberri the whole device and system is less than $500.
Steam that shit to the cloud. Want me to price that for you?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-poli...
These aren't "GoPro" systems, so I wouldn't expect stunning HD.
I'm not sure about access at all though.
Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain.
Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore.
The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals?
The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it?
Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters
Get real people!!
Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.
* Many politicians, like most people, are idiots. Partly because many voters are also idiots.
* Politicians don't have strong incentives to stop problems. (But they don't have strong incentives to preserve problems, either. They're only incentivized to be popular.)
* Principal-agent problems. Even if a politician comes up with a brilliant solution, the people lower in the chain won't execute it well, because they often don't have strong incentives to.
Anyway, there was a conspiracy to preserve problems, any particular politician could start solving problems. This would likely place him above his peers. Then his peers might backstab him, but they also might join him, since he'll have increased popularity. Essentially, we have a sort of iterated n-player prisoner's dilemma; or rather, at each step we choose m people (non-randomly) to together participate in an m-player prisoner's dilemma. It might be interesting to try to model this mathematically.
I wasn't bitching about those people, just explaining how things work on this planet.
You know, like a manual.
I thought The Wire's "Hamsterdam" episode was a great parable on what would happen in America if an influential politician fought inertia and tried to implement socially responsible drug policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsterdam
Much more influential are the prison guard and police unions and organizations. In California alone they oversee more prisoners than all the private prison operators combined and they are very active in strengthening sentencing[1].
But as stated by others the main problem is the politics. There are real problems and politicians can score points with naive voters by "doing something". On the other hand reducing sentences is a very risk position for politician to take.
Blame the politicians and voters as it is their responsibility to set the rules of the game. All the other parties are simply acting in their self-interest.
[1] http://www.policymic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-h...
I don't think it's as easy as blaming the voters. The political system seems caught in a negative feedback loop, greased by lobbyist money and with no clear offramp.
[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-g...
Don't fool yourself with romanticizing history, history is very dark and grim.
And of course you should try to make a lighter and fairer future, but people are people and nature/evolution isn't fair at all.
Grow up.
My experience and wisdom is what made me thrive for this long, I am far from cynical, I am in fact a happy person. :-)