Posted by: Bryan Pick on Saturday, June 23, 2007 Dale beat me to the punch yesterday with a post about recordings of police officers. Radley Balko's article immediately reminded me of a non-fiction book I enjoyed by David Brin called The Transparent Society (subtitle: "Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?"). In his book, published back in 1998, Brin envisions a scene in which a police officer pulls over a young man for a traffic violation, and the officer is videotaping the event (as is increasingly common). He arrives at the car and asks the young man to exit the car, and the young man, suspicious of the heat, brings his own little camera to bear on the officer. Sound familiar? Brin's scene doesn't end with the camera being confiscated and six more police officers showing up in an apparent attempt to intimidate the suspect. Instead, there's a sort of "video standoff" in which both parties are acutely aware that their actions are being recorded. The young man looks at the officer's badge and says, "Well, hello, Officer... 56467. What seems to be the problem?" The officer's video is transmitted straight to the precinct, and the young man's video is transmitted straight home to be recorded on his computer. Place your bets about how the two parties will behave in this situation. You think the officer is going to overstep his bounds, or go by the book? Do you think the young man is going to do something stupid? If either of them do, what are the odds of getting away with it? And if other nearby citizens have their own cameras turned on the scene? The point is, the presence of video cameras helps create mutual accountability. Police officers who conduct themselves properly will be vindicated by evidence of their professionalism if they're ever challenged, while bullies in uniform will be constrained by the ever-watchful eyes of video recorders. And with the arrival of smaller, cheaper, and higher-resolution cameras, this is going to be more and more common, so it's important that cases like this allow citizens to defend themselves and create that accountability for our public servants. On a related note: the ACLU is giving cameras and training to citizens of St. Louis for this very purpose. Seems like a fine idea. I could go on about the benefit of video cameras, but I'll just conclude by saying, perhaps you're not familiar with Witness, which arms human rights groups with video cameras to document abuses. Check it out. |
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