I fail to see the relevance. Traffic cams don’t record people who are recorded as a condition of employment. And pilots don’t seem to have a lot of complaints that their every word is recorded as they talk about their personal lives to each other.
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To be fair Pilots are usually dead when people crack open the black box and review the data on it.
Someone is usually dead when police body cam footage is revealed to the world.
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You fail to see the relevance of the authorities recording and storing more than they were expected to or had promised, whether explicitly or implicitly? I don’t really know how to help you with that.
As for pilots, as soon as you show me some evidence that they’re happy with being recorded in this way, I’ll concede that your counter-example is relevant to the OP: The notion that cops should have volunteered to be recorded.
Cops are “the authorities.” And if you refuse to explain your points, then I say you never had one.
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this is true. too.
That is probably the issue though. If the cameras are only used to show the tiny fraction of interactions that turn out bad then the officer sees it negatively.
Once again not saying they are not needed for oversight and review, just that the officers are likely feeling that it is just another way to smear them for just doing what is at the moment a thankless job.
Isn’t it police departments who are vocal in their support of community and individual surveillance, often citing that chestnut “if you haven’t done anything wrong, then you should have nothing to hide”?
Also, police are expected to do their job in public, so there should be no expectation of privacy there.
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I’d take it over corrupt police force 
But maybe just making them all into meter maids and bringing in entire replacements would be better. Either way i’m glad i don’t live in Boston.
Also, for the record, there are officially too many Ws in this conversation.
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It just ruins the lines of their suits.
My point was that given that they have a monopoly on power, their job is not the same as ours, which probably doesn’t need to be monitored in the same way. They are public servants that can kill us and get away with it.
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Not the same thing. You aren’t given a gun in your job, which you are legally empowered to use.
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We agree on that point.
It’s just sad that the trust in our Brutal Government has fallen so low.
Lack of oversight on policing is one of the reasons that our government is so brutal, actually. I’m all for citizen oversight panels for police.
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Could it be that as governments grow to interact with citizens in more ways there are more opportunities for citizens to feel harassed and abused? More laws which officers are obligated to enforce, more force, to force compliance.
Force force force…
Keep in mind - there is a huge difference between feeling harassed and actually being harassed. They also tend to deploy force in incredibly uneven ways.
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Agree.
Guess my point was that as Governments grow so does the amount of force they wield and the number of ways they employ it. Many of the incidents that have occurred over the past few years could have been avoided if a law or rule with no discernible benefit to citizens had not existed. (The rule about selling single cigarettes in NY comes to mind) These rules are in place for the benefit of The State not the Population and since The State can’t been seen as weak it must impose Force to ensure compliance with even the stupidest of rules.
We have wandered away from the original topic.
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This struck me as similar to “If you don’t have anything to hide then why do you have a problem with… *insert privacy violation here*?”
I don’t want to be recorded or monitored while I do my job. It’s reasonable to expect that others feel the same. That said, it’s also reasonable for the employer (the public in this case) to require monitoring when there’s a significant and well demonstrated problem like body cameras are designed to deal with. Doesn’t mean the employees have to like it or volunteer for it. No one should be surprised that there is resistance.
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Racism plays no role here? it’s not just force, because the monopoly on violence here is being overwhelmingly used on particular people (as is the whole of the criminal justice system). Hence, what I said about force being applied unevenly across communities.
No, I think this is precisely within the topic. Cops and their monopoly on the use of force ties directly back to Boston PD’s collectively refusal to acknowledge that the monopoly on violence goes right back to the social contract, which is meant to be ultimately answerable to the people in a democratic system.
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