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London Police To Wear Video Cameras In Pilot Project
An anonymous reader writes "The London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is reportedly engaging in a year-long pilot program to determine the benefits of its police force wearing video cameras during interactions with the public. 'The pilot will include a total of 500 cameras distributed across ten city boroughs.' London joins some major U.S. cities in this endeavor to improve the quality of policing through the use of wearable cameras. Privacy advocates argue, however, that police officers having these devices on their persons is not enough: 'the efficacy of police body-mounted cameras as a crime reduction and accountability tool hinges on enforcement of good policies and procedures—including something as basic as preventing officers from being able to deactivate the cameras at their own discretion.'"
If you live in a big city then that may be true, but most towns only have a few cameras covering the high street and it's unlikely you'll find them in villages. So for most of the UK it's not true and only hype/lies. You can keep your guns and we will "settle" for lower crime rates.
Being able to turn it off is fine; running a video camera continuously will eat batteries for the sake of recordings that will mostly be useless. The trick is to make sure that the camera is switched on when it is required, and it the heat of the moment I would imagine it would be very easy to genuinely forget to turn the thing on. Perhaps a very noticeable "recording light", similar to that on Google Glass, so that people interacting with the police will both be aware they are being recorded and be in a position to insist the interaction be recorded if it's currently turned off. The whole "my client alleges that he was abused during the arrest, you *do* have the recording, right?" issue should make sure the police want the cameras on as much as possible.
The real trick will be making sure the camera is switched on for spur of the moment stuff, like where an incident happens when the officer is actually present, so perhaps some kind of automatic activation based on feedback from accelerometers and similar activity detectors is also required. If the sensors detect that the officer has started to run, there is a jolt to the camera, or some other abnormal activity, then start recording until the camera is manually disabled again.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
No? How about that Occupy woman who was just sentenced to 7 years for elbowing a cop, but was prevented from rewinding or zooming out the video evidence to provide context to the jury?
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