So yeah while its nice that cops will have to wear them there needs to be sufficient protection from extending what they are used for.
I don't want to live in a world where every cop I walk by, see or don't see, records me.
So yeah while its nice that cops will have to wear them there needs to be sufficient protection from extending what they are used for.
I don't want to live in a world where every cop I walk by, see or don't see, records me.
This sort of tracking can and is already be done manually in relatively small areas using CCTV footage (airports, malls, hotels), but expect to see it become "a thing" for entire cities. "Quantity has a quality all its own."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab...
"The chief of Dubai Police Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said that there are 648 hours of video films in which the 27 suspected persons are appearing.[110]"
I'm not a big fan of surveillance, but it seems to me that being able to retroactively follow individuals throughout the city could be a good tradeoff if it means the police can never again send an innocent person to prison by planting drugs on him after arresting him for something he didn't even do.
The problem is having a huge pile of incomplete evidence makes it easier to make up violations and get them to stick.
Illegitimate prosecutions are built on confirmation bias. The amount of false positive evidence against you is proportional to the amount of surveillance you're under. More government cameras only produce more false positive evidence against you. Meanwhile government cameras can't really help you because your public defender doesn't have the resources to look through the footage and regardless any strong evidence of your innocence will have been the victim of a camera malfunction which "isn't suspicious" because it "happens all the time."
The better solution is for citizens to carry cameras and to have strong laws protecting the right of citizens to record the police. That way the footage can't "disappear" as easily and the recordings are decentralized so you aren't making it easier to fabricate an illegitimate prosecution out of the biased selection of false positives from big data.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (UK) http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-soc... (Norway, replicated in the UK a couple of years ago, but I can't find it offhand) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600869855469#.V... (More meta piece on it)
CCTV hasn't exactly been the panacea that it was made out to be. In fact, councils and private companies have gone ahead with CCTV systems despite the fact that the cost/benefit is dubious at best, and a pretext for reducing staff numbers in a significant number of cases.
tl;dr - Not the end of the world, but not great either, and has paved the way for a number of subsequent surveillance modes.
> There are countless examples of CCTV abuse in the UK
OK, but you've linked to a paper on CCTV operators being bored and ineffective, a list of papers discussing the moral implications, and finally a 16-year-old piece that claims to have substantiated some of the public's concerns.That feels quite a long way from "countless examples".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Council...
(That article kind of misses the point of RIPA - councils always did that kind of snooping, but now they're required to work so a standard and are somewhat accountable.)
People doing any of those things are absolute assholes and I'm really thankful councils are using CCTV to try to catch them.