Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

Somewhat of a clickbait headline. He used "Citizens" in contrast to police, in a discussion about body cameras:

>Another thing: body cameras, we completely redesigned body cameras. [...] Remember this terrible case in Memphis where the 5 police officers basically beat to death another citizen in Memphis, well that can't happen because it would be on TV at headquarters, everyone would see it, your body cams would be transmitting that. The police would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on, citizens would be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

I'm not a fan of surveillance, but this article seems weird. The entire article, including the headline, consisting of a single quote, and without adding any context. A charitable interpretation would be that "citizens would be on their best behavior with police, because they know police can check the footage." I'm not necessarily advocating for charitable interpretations, but when you don't even provide the full sentence of the quote, you are not even allowing the reader to attempt to draw their own conclusion.

https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024... 1:10:03

Yeah, such words are a giveaway.

Another:

It is not “this simplified, kindergarten-level explanation”, it is “this explicit, thoughtful one”

In this case I suspect the poster used GPT (looks like OpenAI) to generate the initial response and then edited it.

> The US has been captured by a foreign power that has no interest in the welfare of the people

Huh?

While that's pithy, I think it's also incorrect, because it implies that Oracle / Ellison is controllable by us, in the same way a tool / lawnmower is. That's absolutely not true. It has its own motivations that are best-case neutral to our goals.

It might be better to think of ourselves as individual fish in a school of fishes, and Oracle is the boat with a mile long dragnet. It doesn't care about the individual fish; it's not worth it's time to consider us individually. It's thinking in terms of tonnage.

"In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment,"

That is a near textbook case of abusing statistics. Those things are completely independent variables. Perhaps "civilians" (as opposed to what, military?) killed by police increased because crime increased. Or population increased. Or laws changed. Or bullets changed.

Why would we expect widespread adoption of bodycams to decrease the number of criminals shot and killed by police? That starts with the spurious assumption that the police are randomly shooting and killing citizens in droves without cause and bodycams would put a stop to it. As it turns out, this isn't happening, so bodycams have no influence on the variable.

There's no need to read the rest of that article if the authors are trying to secretly sell such a pejorative opinion.

I invite you to go watch a couple hundred bodycam vids on YouTube. It may change your perspective on what police deal with. What I see consistently, regardless of department, is police bending over backwards and using all kinds of non-lethal force, to the point of risking their own lives, before using lethal force. There are well-publicized exceptions but in the vast majority of cases, the officers are facing someone using lethal force against them.