Slashdot Mirror
Should Cops Wear Google Glass?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Over at The Kernel, staff writer Greg Stevens wonders whether police departments around the world should outfit their officers with Google Glass. There's some logic behind the idea. A cop with wearable electronics constantly streaming audio and video back to a supervisor (or even a Website) would be less likely, at least in theory, to take liberties with civilians' civil liberties. But not everybody thinks it's such a good idea. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote in a recent blog posting that society needs to make choices 'about the extent to which we want to allow the government to store up that data so that it has the power to hit 'rewind' on everybody's lives.' In the view of that organization, 'that's just too much power.' That being said, law enforcement wearing electronics that streams constant video and audio data would still be subject to the law. 'If the officer is recording a communication he has in public with someone, there's probably no wiretap problem since there's at least the consent of one party and no expectation of privacy,' Hanni M. Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an email to Slashdot. 'But if he's recording peripheral communications between two separate individuals, than there's potential wiretap liability depending on the circumstances.' What do you think? Are cops wearing Google Glass (or similar wearable electronic) a good idea?"
The San Francisco Fire Chief just banned fire helmet mounted cameras after helmet-cam footage from the Asiana crash became public. Some say it was done to protect the privacy of victims, others to protect the city from liability as in this case where one of the victims was still alive when run over by a responding fire truck.
That is exactly why they are so badly needed. Not Glass, but a continuous recording device.
Several cities started pilot programs with cop-cameras, and mine was among them buying 80 cop-cams. We had a few bad cops fired, complaints against cops almost vanished, and now the city is trying to make it mandatory for all cops on duty. They provide strong evidence both to support your innocence and to support your guilt. They also provide evidence against bad cops.
Look at the New York Times article regarding the results from one city: Complaints about abuse and civil rights violations dropped by 80%, use of force dropped by 60%.
Bonus points are that the camera footage is evidence. If they are notified to keep the footage, they MUST do it and the MUST turn it over to your defense. As this type of footage grows we can demand "pics or it didn't happen". Just like the dash cams transformed traffic tickets (rate of claimed abuse plummeted, rate of fought tickets increased because there was video evidence) the same should spread to all aspects of police work. Around here it is already transforming defense lawyer's approaches because they can get unmodified views of the crime scene from every officer's point of view. (This becasuse the recordings are evidence, and any potentially exculpatory evidence must be shared with the defendant.)
I hope it takes off. If an officer says there was anything from a 'confession' of a crime or there are claims of police abuse, if there is no cop-camera footage the judge and jury should be asking, "what is this cop trying to hide?"
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement