Sylver Dragon's Journal: Cops with frickin' cameras on their frickin' heads

I was over at Fark and ran across this gem. And it occurred to me, we've already mandated (at least here in CA) that police cruisers have dash-mounted cameras in them, when are we going to finally break down and just require some sort of always on, remotely recorded, camera be worn at all times by police officers? While I tend to believe that 99% of police officers are good people who really do want to help people, the 1% that have lost (or never had) perspective are a real big problem. As a society we have given police special powers, in order to protect the common good, when they abuse those powers, they are in a position to do a lot of damage to the common good.
An officer mounted camera would be good for all parties involved. For example, the news has heavily covered this shooting recently. One of the key questions in the death is whether or not the officers identified themselves sufficiently. If each of the officers raiding the home had been wearing a camera (with audio, of course) this question would have been real easy to answer. As it is, the dash-mounted cameras have been a boon for both the public and officers. For the citizens, there is hard evidence when an officer goes overboard, and also the officers know that the camera is there, so it makes them think about what they are doing. On the other side, there are some great videos of people who will bang their own head against a police car's hood while cuffed, and then claim police brutality; in this case the video protects the police officers.
The technology is already there. Currently soldiers in Iraq are using helmet mounted cameras to record and post videos to the internet. I'm sure that adapting this to police work would not be hard.
Also, think about the advantage this would provide for evidence collection. Anything the police do would be recorded, which means that they don't have to rely on memory or recognizing important things the first time.

not a horrible idea.

[ak3ldama]

i love how she shot them after they 'broke in'. they definitely need to review their no knock policy. to tell you the truth, if i lived where she did i would have done the same thing.

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[Sylver Dragon]

Ya, the no knock idea seems to be ending up in this sort of situation too often. If someone is breaking down my door, my first thought is going to be that it's a home invasion style robbery, and ya I'd go for a gun too. I do realize that the point of this sort of thing is to preserve evidence, usually drugs which would be flushed. Though my view on it is that this is just another example of the problem with the war on drugs in general. It's causing situations which result in people being killed for no r

I like the idea as well

[Degrees]

I wonder about the storage requirements though. For how long should the video be kept? In what format? Should it be put on the 'net for joe citizen to view?

At the moment, if you demand a FOIA search, the defendant / government-agency-supplying-the-data gets to charge you for the cost of information retrieval. If they just throw the video into a database without any indexing, it might be ridiculously expensive to compel whichever agency to divulge the files. Of course, in the kid's case, if his parents sue,

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[Sylver Dragon]

I agree, the storage requirements would be rather high. You would need to use some sort of lossless compression, and there would need to be a good rotation policy in place. Just thinking about digital CCTV systems and their storage systems, you'd be looking at a massive RAID system to handle this. It would probably be best to distribute the system using an off-site storage location per precinct. As for length of storage, I'd probably have to say we would need like a year of online storage then some sort