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London Police Equipped With 360-Degree Cams
OriginalArlen writes, "In a story so surreal I had to check the primary source, the Register reports that the (London, UK) Metropolitan Police are trying out the use of eight tiny cams, mounted in the police helmet, to provide 360-degree evidence gathering in the event that an officer witnesses a crime. The press release also gives more evidence of the stealth spread of ubiquitous ANPR systems across the country as a spin-off 'benefit' to the London car congestion-charging scheme, which is likely to be rolled out across the country in the next few years. Are we already living in a Panopticon Society?" According to this report from the information commissioner for Great Britain, yep.
I can't find anywhere that mentions if the cops have the ability to turn it off or not. I would be very skeptical of any police video that has been "edited" (turning the camera off at certain moments) by the police officer in question.
An example of what I mean: A cop gets called "pig" (the UK version), cop turns off video, kicks the crap out of kid, turns video back on, and then says "I was attacked! You saw him trying to provoke me!" Or whatever, you guys get the idea.
I agree that turning the camera off would look pretty odd, depending on what had happened when the camer was back on...
But really I can't see this as anything but a good thing. A police officer may well be able to keep a little calmer in tense situations knowing everything he does is recorded. If someone is really causing trouble, it helps clear the officer from wrongdoing as well. It's just an extension of cameras they put in every police car for traffic stops...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe I'm the only one, but when I saw the headline, I thought of the line in Robocop: "You idiot! His memory is admissible as evidence!"
With this, the police can't beat you up for no reason and get away with it.
So now a London bobby's greeting will be, "Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello"?
The camera's are NOT 360 degree.
Article with picture
This won't really change a thing in favour of the citizens. It will be used to cover their backs when the police doing things right (which is most of the time), raise a bit of revenue when they sell it off for a britains-dumbest-criminals-type tv show, but don't forget the poor brazilian guy who was executed on the tube last year. The police "lost" the videos for that one, and the tube system is already wall-to-wall with cameras for our "security".
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
In all likelihood, the U.S. is also creeping towards a 'Surveillance Society'. Response to terrorism (from the IRA) was one of drivers of the UKs current propensity towards spying on its citizens, fear of Al Queda and Islamic Militants will be our undoing as well. In times of unease and mass fear it's often easy to give up freedoms, but ever so difficult to bring them back. Hopefully Americans will recognize this before we merrily join the UK and strap video cameras to every public park, building, and employee.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
We need highly portable petabyte flash rom to make pentopticon a reality for everybody. While I have no doubt that (at least at the resolution my PDA displays) you can get 8 low res video feeds, with audio, at a cost of only 100MB/HR, and thus a 4GB compact flash could handle recording everything a police constable does for a half a shift (change the card at lunch, with a couple of spare card sto slap in after a crime occurs so that the original card could be "sealed" for chain of evidence purposes), this technology won't be widespread until you can go a month or more without changing the data storage card out.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
From BBC : "The average citizen in the UK is caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day."
Have you ever honestly tried to watch one of those police tapes? I wanted to view one because of a incident
that had happened me but after the stalling by police the tape 'vanished'. The system protects itself.
Its only logical......not necessarily right but its logic.
all communication is essentially libralizing - so from my point of view, more commnication is always a good thing
surveillence is one kind of communication. the problems that happen is when the information gathered by surveillence is not shared or accessible broadly
in an ideal world, there would be lots and lots of surveillence, including all the interactions and discussions by the public, elected officials, and all the feeds could be viewed by the public
Don't you think that in the end all those trips to the donut shop would get boring? The endless conversations about hemorrhoids would definetly be disturbing....
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The police turning off their cameras is a problem ( I recall seeing picture from 60s Selma voting marches where cops covered their badge numbers with black take before beating up marchers )
But what if I am wearing a similar camera array?
... is not so much the police doing this as the people letting them.
I still don't understand why they don't just use a single higher res camera, mount it facing upwards, then stick a curved lens above it to give a 360 view all round.
Glorified strip malls? Depends on what city, I guess, but NYC, Boston, Philly, and DC certainly don't really fit that definition. As far as paying tolls, many Interstate highways are toll-free since the stipulation is that in order to get Federal funding for the construction of a *new* Interstate highway, the road must be toll-free. This has been true since the early 1960s - most of the tolled roads are earlier freeways, built in the 1930s to the 1950s. But even then, the tolls are not particularly onerous for passenger cars. In NJ, the Turnpike is about $4 end-to-end (about 120 miles), and some of the tolls can be bypassed by using a parallel freeway. I think the Garden State Parkway (coastal north-south route) is about the same for a ~180 mile trip. Tolls to enter New York City from NJ are usually $6 for cars and $5 for motorcycles. They can even be thought of as a congestion charge of sorts, but less expensive.
And our Interstate highways are pretty straight and very suitable for high speeds. Average speed even in congested NJ is on the order of 75-80 mph. Probably higher out West.
-b.
Granted, the cop version has more memory and a screen but...???
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Bush administration officials announced today that for national security, homeland security will be installing cameras in every American's underpants starting on 1 January 2007. The cameras are to protect America from the evils of sin and sex and to provide the senators and congressmen with easy access to protect the jewel of American society: the teen boy. This plan is part of a larger project that was spearheaded by the departed Donald Rumsfeld last year who departed amid criticisms that he encourage homosexual acts in Abu Grahib as a method of stress relief for the soldiers. His original "Operation Panty-cam" plan was discouraged due to concerns about the name and what it implied.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Seriously. I bicycle a lot, and cyclists experience all kinds of aggression from people in cars -- flipping the bird, shouting, throwing things. First it scares the crap out of you, but once fear subsides, you want to get even. If you had a camera on your bike helmet, well, your memory would be admissible as evidence. As this technology gets cheaper, I have to think that ordinary citizens may choose to protect themselves in this way.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
If a cop's got one of these on and he does something out of line, you can just look at the tape, whereas otherwise it might just be your word against his.
The key to a "Panoptic" society is that you can be watched at any time, but not always all the time, and you don't know at any given moment whether you're being watched or not. Thus you turn everyone into paranoid little crazies, easily controlled and turned against one another.
As for just looking at the tape, consider the Brazilian guy the British police shot a while back. Police say he was running and leaping turnstiles, witnesses say he wasn't running and he even stopped to pay his fare. But hey, there's closed-circuit cameras everywhere. Let's go to the tapes.... oh wait, looks like all the cameras were turned off that day! Wow! what a coincidence! (the "non-existent" tapes later turned up)
And we have far greater problems still with our current government's obsession with the perceived terrorist threat. Last week there was a big thing made of the head of one of our security services, stating that they had x groups and y individual terrorist suspects under surveillance, and knew of at least z active plans to hurt us. A lot of our media was hyping how terrible things really are, and now we really know how bad the real terrorist threat really is.
Me, I thought "Is that all?" and figured we'd do better if we spent the gazillions of pounds we throw at "anti-terror" activities on cutting KSI figures for road traffic accidents, researching promising medical treatments, and raising education standards. This is not to belittle those who belong to the security services. Indeed, I've no doubt that they do some valuable work and protect us from some genuine threats, and I'm grateful to them for it. But sometimes, the price of a little extra security (you can never have 100%, nor anywhere close) is just too high. Tony Blair has talked a lot during his time in office about taking tough decisions. The tough decision on terrorism is not to take all those headline-grabbing steps that ultimately reduce overall quality of life, in a futile attempt to make the country Safe And Secure(TM).
This camera thing is just another gimmick. It used to be that children would naturally respect a police officer and the local constable would stop and say hello to them in the park while walking his beat, yet today the police feel the need to cover their backsides with all kinds of video footage. Why have the police lost the implicit moral authority they used to have? Why is antisocial behaviour one of the biggest dirty marks on today's society? What happened to policing by consent? It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide whether the answers involve the threat of terrorism, or whether they're more to do with the government stripping parents and teachers of any legal right to effectively discipline children, misunderstanding human rights to mean treating convicted criminals like the second coming, adopting the nanny state view of legislation over education, enacting an extensive series of laws that are more about ease of enforcement than outlawing genuinely harmful behaviour, and eschewing all sense of personal responsibility from senior ministers on down in favour of a litigous, CYA, spin-laden society.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
dam it
[queue music = inspector gadget]
If the cops are required to log their entire shifts in video to an auditable repository every day, then this tech will serve the public well. Let them take 15 minute privacy breaks every couple of hours, as long as their partner stays on duty, logging their outro/intro from the break.
Cops could file most reports by voiceover annotations of what they videoed. Most of their court and other official testimony could be submitted as sworn video/narration. That would save hours of time doing what they do worst, paperwork, and keeping them engaged in the scene. Offering "eyewitness evidence" with an interpreter. Returning the "word" of the cop to the more reliable status cops want it to be. Offering juries firsthand experience of how cops might have made an honest mistake. And creating a library of suspects useable by the entire justice system, once accepted as evidence on probable cause.
And keeping cops honest. Which protects the good ones, which accounts for 99% of the hours cops work. This system would also capture, or deter, the other 1% that does so much harm. While increasing productivity on the street and on the case, cutting costs and corroborating credibility.
We have to keep in mind that technology will continue to make the distinctions between public and private more operational. So we should exploit our systems for improving the public behavior we expect. While also protecting the privacy we expect, which allows the public to function. So these records should be private, stored for limited durations unless court ordered, and never shared except within explicitly court ordered transactions.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy. But after they'd played around with this tech and these rights for a while, we in the US will have even more reason to add a Privacy Amendment to our Constitution to protect ourselves. Combined with improved police protection, we can be more secure. Or, without protections on both sides of the public/private boundry, we'll all be made criminals.
--
make install -not war
I don't see why you couldn't wear one too, and then you'd be able to show your (assumedly) unexpurgated version alongside theirs, and thus prove not only did they do something wrong, but that they attempted to cover it up.
More realistically though, unless you want to be like the gargoyle guy from Snow Crash, totally covered in data-capture gear, what's going to keep law enforcement and government in check are the little cameras on everyone's cellphones. The tasering incident at UCLA is just the beginning; in the next few years as video-cameraphones become more ubiquitous, and ways for sharing the resulting video (Youtube, Flickr, etc.) become totally mainstream, you'll be able to pull out your cameraphone when you see something odd going on, and post it to the web (hopefully with some sort of geotagging and time/date stamping), and suddenly the onus will be on the cops to show exactly what they were doing.
Cameraphones and YouTube are more than just ways to make porn and stupid pet videos, they could be the beginning of a whole new era in the balance of power between common people and the authorities. How the people in power attempt to regulate the use of these technologies should give you a good indication of how threatened they feel by them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As someone who installs CCTV (goobye karma) I've held my tongue on quite a few occasions here, but you can 'stop' all this.
The data protection laws introduced about two years ago give you a few few tools. Firstly, any CCTV recording OR monitoring system in public places must be announced (this includes places that you are invited into automatically, like shops etc), the announcing sign must state 3 things, that there is a monitoring/recording system in use, for what purpose it is there (and the purpose of monitoring/recording doesn't cut it), who is in charge of administering the system and how to contact them.
Now the important thing here is the 'contact them', under UK data protection laws you have the right to claim your digital image, send the 'administrators' (the only ones who have legal access to the system to review/archive recordings) a letter explaing where you were, a cheque for £10 (the reasonable fee they are allowed to charge), what day you were there (don't be to precise), proof of address (utility bill etc) and a 'valid for passport' style photo. It is then their job to search through the footage looking for you, extract the right footage, and here's the kicker, remove the faces of anyone else on that footage before they send it to you or else they are in breach of the data protection act (which I can assure you most CCTV administrators do not have the equipment/skills to do).
The best way to use these rules are to hang about outside busy tube stations in rush hour, permanently on camera, and don't stop moving, that would make masking other faces too easy.
The police use camcorders at a lot of large public demonstrations, this is also a good time to use these laws, especially if you were not there.
Do not underestimate the power of the data protection act, people have used it to force documents out of MI5, and one guy got of a charge of armed robbery, as most of the case rested on CCTV evidence that was ruled inadmissible because the shop keeper had no signage up.
I have thought of this in the past. Wouldn't 1 camera aimed up at reflective sphere pick up everything 360 degrees around (exept straight up, but the 8 cameras wouldn't get that either). You would need to use a computer to display the image correcly but in the end I think it would work well.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I read about this story a couple of days ago in the Metro newspaper... complete with a photo of the headset. It's not 360, and each officer only gets one camera. The force has just been given 8 of them, for 8 people to wear. Hmm, "you couldn't make it up"? Apparently, OriginalArlen, you did.
If it's part of the countrywide APNR network, it's 2 years in a central database, or up to 6 years if part of a log thats used in evidence in a court case - even if you're not the person in court,
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.