41–50 of 117 posts
I used to think Steve "wearable PC" Mann was a crackpot, but his sousveillance [1] argument is making more and more sense. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
I wish I had ten upvotes for this. Or a hundred. I love devil's advocate, so I'll say this just as a way of keeping things in perspective: not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work and putting it on YouTube (along with criticisms) I know it would drive me nuts. Society as a whole is going to have to go through some major contortions as people get their heads wrapped around the idea…
Not a lot of folks carry lethal weapons as part of their job. Not a lot of folks can land you in jail as part of their job. As the ones authorized to use violence and lethal force in order to do their jobs, they should be subject to additional scrutiny.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop making the consumption of drugs illegal, and it's no longer necessary to have a policeman that looks like a drug dealer.
Even if you make drugs legal, we still need undercover operations to deal with criminal organisations. What about the groups that kill people for money, or extort 'protection money', or groups that rob banks? Unless you want to make murder, arson and theft legal, you need to go undercover in these groups.
1. I'm not saying that drugs themselves have to be legal. I think our current policy of punishing drug use is the bad thing. If drugs are to be illegal, the sensible thing is to punish production and sale. Then you can develop a dynamic where a user who wants to get clean can get some kind of reward for turning in a dealer. Then dealing becomes less attractive because there's a higher likelihood of being caught. Rehab the users, punish the providers makes more sense to me than Just punish everyone.
2. The original point was the idea that it might be a bad idea to video tape undercover officers. I think we've managed to stray from that a bit. I don't think we should concern ourselves with worrying about such video taping: either the criminal organization already cares about such things and can get that information readily, or they don't care and getting video taped once isn't going to change anything. Getting outed as an undercover agent pretty much destroys your chance to do that again, anyways, regardless of the presence of video taping (which I wouldn't expect to actually happen much in practice in these kinds of cases).
There's just something massively wrong with "public servants" claiming they can't be photographed while performing a public service. Bullshit. There would be no complaints if some of them weren't incriminating abusive cops. Notice how many of the cases against photographing are in potential (or blatant) police-abuse situations. The public and the government should be applauding citizens for helping to maintain contro…
- if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about being videotaped?
- we want you to be videotaped for your own protections...so that a scumbag citizen doesn't sue the department by making things up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there would be complaints. Once they adjust to the video taping they will forget the tapes are there and act as they would anyway. The big difference comes because the douches would get caught sooner, as everyone would know a complaint would actually have merit. The cynic in me worries that it would work out this way instead tho: As video of the cops being douches becomes commonplace, people just come to accept…
I fear that as well, but if there's enough pressure, the "always on tape" mentality might win out, and good cops could get the recognition they deserve, as well as significantly more evidence (and more accurate - witnesses are pretty bad) for many crimes. If nothing else, it's better than the alternative; when it's your word vs a cop, who's going to be trusted? Disallowing this would encourage abusers. Honestly, I se…
it got that department a ton of positive publicity
right now the only times you hear about cops is when they do the bad stuff.
I wish I had ten upvotes for this. Or a hundred. I love devil's advocate, so I'll say this just as a way of keeping things in perspective: not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work and putting it on YouTube (along with criticisms) I know it would drive me nuts. Society as a whole is going to have to go through some major contortions as people get their heads wrapped around the idea…
not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work Did you know if you get a Top Secret clearance, you have to have anything related to your work release reviewed for the rest of your life? Being awarded privileges by the government comes with additional responsibility. Videotaping the police is the same as monitoring people who work with classified information; it's just part of the job. If…
PS: If that's the case it seems like cop/cam might be a marketable product.
I wish I had ten upvotes for this. Or a hundred. I love devil's advocate, so I'll say this just as a way of keeping things in perspective: not a lot of folks would want people videotaping everything they did at work and putting it on YouTube (along with criticisms) I know it would drive me nuts. Society as a whole is going to have to go through some major contortions as people get their heads wrapped around the idea…
EDIT for a bad sentence structure. And then a typo.
Like many, I've followed Radley Balko's articles for some time and have a growing sense of paranoia/constitutional outrage regarding false arrest. I think there are a couple of interesting phenomena here. Some folks may not like the two ideas below but I offer them as a conversation starter for understanding what is happening instead of just venting outrage (which is cool too).
1.) Growing ubiquity of recording equipment formerly thought of as "surveillance equipment.” In the not distant past, very small cameras were specialty equipment only available to certain people. In that time, the common thinking was that a person should have some highly-motivated intent for using such stuff because it was very expensive and if you weren't in law enforcement or a PI, then your use was probably not for good.
2.) Law is complex and large, so law enforcement uses some heuristic of propriety instead of actual laws. My impression is that law enforcement people contain a large but not all-encompassing menu of crimes and use some form of pattern matching to compare the behavior of other humans to this menu. Since it is inefficient to compare every rule to each encounter with other people, law enforcement people use the general feeling they get from an encounter to first signal that something is "wrong" and then guide them to a particular item from the crime menu or reach into the foggier area of laws off their personal menu.
Fitting idea 1 with idea 2, it makes sense that there would be an unofficial "war on recording" by law enforcement as the propriety value of the law heuristic is driven in part by cultural values which in turn are slowly influenced by technology. In this case, technology change has occurred more quickly than many people’s sense of probity.