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

About a year and a half back, I wrote this entry in my journal. Essentially saying that we should find a way to mount a camera on every police officer. Today, I saw this on Popular Mechanics. The long and the short of it is that Taser Inc. has been reading my journal. That, or they just have someone who thinks like I do. Either way, they are trying to make the idea of a cop "head-cam" a reality. This just seems full of Win to me. Evidence collection will be better; an officer taking a statement will have a good record to work with; if an officer goes too far, there will be a record; if some dumbass screams abuse, the officer will have a record of the encounter to exonerate himself.

The only piece of the puzzle which I expect to be lacking at inception, is going to be public access to the stored video. Excepting where it would compromise an on-going investigation, or violate the privacy of a citizen or the officer, I would want the video to be publicly accessible. After all, if there is nothing for them to worry about, then there is nothing to hide, right?

I'm torn...

[Shadow Wrought]

In some ways I think it is a good idea, but at the same time... if we don't trust them, then why are we giving them weapons and sending them onto the streets. I think it is a band-aid that could ease the symptoms, but allow greater problems to fester unseen.

For simplicity sake, say tehre are Good Cops®, Bad Cops®, and Corrput Cops®. Good Cops will remain Good Cops will remain Good Cops, but a mistake on camera could be unforgivable. Bad Cops will be reduced, but most Bad Cops aren't mal

Re:

[Sylver Dragon]

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I tend to believe that the pool of bad cops and corrupt cops is already rather small (excepting maybe in Chicago and LA). Shifting them around doesn't seem to be that big of an issue. Where I see the cameras as useful is in evidence collection.

Without anything to go on, I'm willing to bet that there have been plenty of instance where officers have wished they had a permanent record of a conversation or occurrence. If the trade off is to differentiate the grey area a bit, I do

I like the idea, but....

[Degrees]

I like the idea. I do see a couple of problems though.

FWIW, I'm in the middle of an e-discovery project, where some of our Sheriff's officers are being sued for abuse during an arrest. My job is to search their email for anything relating to the plaintiff on or after the date of arrest.

It would be terrific if we had the video of everything that happened during and after the arrest. I doubt we would be looking at email if the video was available.

On the other hand, this incident happened in 2005. Two and a

Re:

[Sylver Dragon]

I do agree that the data storage is a problem. In my previous life working on security and access control system, we faced this on the last project I worked on before my department was imploded. We had a hundred-odd cameras recording color video at 30fps in 640x480 resolution. The requirement was to hold all of the recordings for 30 days (mind you it's about 5 years ago so my numbers may be fuzzy). We were able to do it, it just took a 42U rack full of rather advanced disk chassis for the time (NextSAN'