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Watching the Police: Will Two-Way Surveillance Reduce Crime?
An anonymous reader writes "As surveillance technologies have matured in both their sophistication and usage, some are starting to ask the question: is it time we start using them to watch the watchers? The proliferation of dashboard cameras has reduced liability costs, provided valuable evidence, and made police officers safer. The next progression would naturally be for the camera to move out of the car and onto the officer's uniform itself. In The Verge appears a fascinating report about the company behind the non-lethal stun guns that have become commonplace around the world, Taser International, which has set out to transform policing once again – this time, with Axon Flex, a head-mounted camera with a twelve-hour battery life that officers can use to record interactions. The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen. Footage is then uploaded to a cloud-based service where it can be accessed by the police department. It includes an audit trail to reveal who has accessed the information and when."
if 100% of the footage is uploaded/published on a regular basis.
Remove the ability of a department to "lose" the info. Perhaps even send the raw footage to the AFL-CIO
UPS Sucks
The device is constantly on, but it only captures video of the thirty seconds before its wearer begins using it, and then both video and audio while police are speaking to a citizen.
But not when beating the citizen? Or violating his rights?
The imbalance of power does. Giving the cops a headcam should be enough reason not to have to confiscate everyone's phone now.
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Ubiquitous surveillance of everyone by everyone is inevitable. Dashcams and google glass are merely the first. Cams will become smaller, batteries will become smaller, internet will become faster, and everyone will automatically store what they see in their cloud of preference.
Finally witness statements, which are proven to be unreliable, can be backed up by actual evidence.
Hurrah for progress.
Take this system one step further and then it might actually be useful for helping protect citizens: have the system identify the person the officer is talking to (facial recognition, NFC beacon from my phone, whatever) and when the video is uploaded to the cloud, make it automatically uploaded to the private cloud storage owned by everyone in the video.
Otherwise, the video is likely to "accidentally" disappear when it shows wrongdoing by the police.
Strangely, the scenarios presented were placed 20 years in the future. Posted in 1993, then-revolutionary Wired Magazine got it exactly, dead on. It's almost strange how they were so dead-on as far as the time scale.
Notice all the dash cam footage coming out of the Soviet Union...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I've said this for years. I have no problem with all the public-facing cameras, so long as the output from all those cameras is available to the public, preferably directly, in realtime. The cameras then become a public asset. Law enforcement can use them, but so can the rest of us. There's already no expectation of privacy in public places, so I don't see any issues with universal access to the data.
I'd guess it might be necessary to restrict access to police dashcams and "uniform-cams" for a time, but eventually it should all be made public, with review processes in place to make sure that none of it gets "accidentally" deleted.
Any group surveiling the cops shouldn't be selling those cops stuff. "Hey, the XYZ PD just ordered another $500k of merch from us, I think we can 'lose' that embarrassing video."
Taser International is a bunch of evil fuckwads who've made their bankrolls selling lethal electrical torture devices to police. Their irresponsible marketing has lead to an increase in the use of excessive force by cops. My trust in them is zero.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Not only *Can* this happen but there's quite a track record of it happening.
There's no transparency if surveillance goes only one way. That's total control.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Tasers are less lethal torture devices mainly used to force compliance.
Your disinformation disguists me and all responsible citizens, AC. The manual clearly states, right on page 19:
"RECOMMENDED DRIVE-STUN AREAS FOR MAXIMUM EFFECT
Drive the X26C into the following areas for maximum effectiveness.
Carotid (sides of neck) (see warning below).
Brachial plexus tie-in (upper chest).
Radial (forearm).
Pelvic triangle (see warning below).
Common peronial (Outside of thigh).
Tibial (calf muscle).
WARNING: Use care when applying a drive-stun to the neck or pelvic triangle. These areas
are sensitive to mechanical injury (such as crushing to the trachea or testicles if applied
forcefully). However, these areas have proven highly effective targets. "
How responsible as that? A safety warning because they care just that much. Can you say that you care that much about Safety? I thought not.
There should be a standard procedure for requesting access to the videos:
1) If you are a police office, you get access to all the videos (audited access, of course)
2) If you are a member of the public, you must apply (actual application, not some wimpy online form with "enter your e-mail address/choose a username"), pay a modest annual fee, be verified, and then you get access to the videos (audited just as much as the police).
This way you don't get people crawling PoliceCamVideos.com and reposting that video of the cops who chased a perp into the ladies' gym locker room.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Exactly, what most people seem to forget is that the taser is supposed to only be used when a gun would have been a good choice as well. It should not be used on 90 year old ladies, who have no way of running away or defending themselves. It should not be used on kids. It shouldn't be used on people who are handcuffed. It is a deadly weapon, and must be given proper precautions, similar to a firearm. Sure tasers don't kill all the time, but neither does a gun.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Imagine if you had to wear one of these at your work place knowing that your boss can activate it at any time
That's the deal you should have to accept if you want authorization to use force on your fellow citizens. If you're not OK with complete oversight, I'm not OK with granting you power.
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I guess we should go back to the old option to subdue an armed violent suspect; guns. I think tazers are a much better option than shooting a person wielding a weapon. Sure tazers have killed people but then so have batons. If you confront police with a weapon you may die. Tazers are much less likely to kill than guns.
Just because Tazer International builds the recording system does not mean that they will run it.
It's not about the armed violent suspects. It's the unarmed violent suspects, or unarmed not-particularly-violent suspects, or even the armed, non-violent suspects. Tasers aren't used just as an alternative to lethal force, they're used as an alternative to other forms of less-lethal force.
Think about it. You're a little kid. You have just a metal bat. How likely are you to randomly hit someone with it? Not very, right? I mean, it would hurt, and there would be repercussions to hurting someone. Now we'll give you a foam bad. How likely are you to randomly hit someone with it? If you're anything like my nephew, you're going to smack everybody with it as soon as they get into range because, hey, foam bats don't hurt that much, right? Now how about a hard plastic wiffle bat? You're not going to kill someone with it, but you can sure as hell cause some pain by doing it. Swing that around a few times, and you're going to actually hurt people. Not broken bone pain, but you'll raise some welts. You're not going to cause the kind of damage a metal bat would, but you're going to use it a lot more often than you really should.
This is the problem with tasers. They make the Police think they should use them when we as citizens think they shouldn't be using a weapon at all.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.