Holy 1984!
Bruce Harrell, a city councilman who has self designated himself as a representative of people of color, has taken up the Copcam cause. The idea is to mount videocams on the cops .. presumably only when they are on duty .. to assure that the cops can be held responsible for their actions. readmore at Publicola.
This is inane. The logical extension ought to be telemetry for the cops EKG and brainwaves so an alarm can go off whenever a cop is stressed out. Gosh, astronauts are already instrumented, why not cops?
Cops need to make a lot of hard judgements and having a camera on them at all times is not going to make that an easier. I want resposnible professionals working as my cops, people I can trust. “Cop” ought not o be an epithet any more than “nurse,” “doctor” or priest is an epithet. To do their jobs, all of these authority figures need to be truste not instrumented like a robot or watched over like the dealers at the Blackjack tables in Vegas.
Cops ARE like priests, doctors, nurses,, teacher, lawyers. We need to give a lot of authority to these professions and the people taking on that responsibility need to know we trust them to make difficult judgements. If a cop pr a doc breaks that trust, then the penalties need to be severe .. in my opinion a lot more sevcere than the current law allows.
Replacing trust and penalties with big brother will lead to cops who can n ot make difficult decisions.
What next?
classrooms all must be videotaped and streamed live so parents can see how their kids are being treated,
same for operating rooms
and judges chambers
how about all those damn scientists doing animal experiments?
obviously we need to add the priests, esp. in the confessional