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NYPD Is Beta-Testing Google Glass
Presto Vivace writes "The New York City Police Department is trying to determine how useful Google Glass would be for law enforcement. From the article: 'The New York City Police Department's massive and controversial intelligence and analytics unit is evaluating whether Google Glass is a decent fit for investigating terrorists and helping cops lock up bad guys, VentureBeat has learned. The department recently received several pairs of the modernist-looking specs to test out. "We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we're trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes," a ranking New York City law enforcement official told VentureBeat.'"
Several police forces have been hammering people who record police with wiretapping charges. Eventually wearable computers with 3/4G will be commonplace. I am sure that wearable video will help knock down frivolous complaints against police officers for misconduct and will sometimes magically be corrupted when recordings might prove wrongdoing.
However, eventually there will be so many people wearing so many video cameras it'll be impossible for bad apples to say all of the independently recorded videos magically were deleted or got corrupted on the floppy disc. And there will be so many citizens wearing cameras that there will be too many SD cards to confiscate.
A large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. I think digital video will have as large an impact on policing as the telephone and radio. If you've been following, there was a constable in the UK who basically can be seen lying on camera about smelling alcohol on a protester's breath. (Google it, it's all over LiveLeak.) Guys like this will -- one hopes -- get cashiered. Baddies who hope to win the lawsuit lottery by inventing abuse should also expect to have a hard time.
Of course, police have become used to yelling 'Stop resisting' when handcuffing in case they're being videotaped so the Darwinian behavioural game continues.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
May "olives and feta" be our code for "fuck the beta" going forward. Like, you're in a bar in Palo Alto and somebody mentions how their company is redesigning their site and you go, "so it's olives and feta" and they either know what you're talking about or they don't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?