The comments seem to me rather along the lines of “the cameras should watch, and keep accountable, the guardians”.
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& both are conveniently turned off every time the police do something horrible.
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Actually, not that certainly.
I have two that may be powerful enough for the task.
The pulsed Nd:YAG one does not have enough energy; a third of a joule is a photoflash. Nothing much to talk about even if the pulse is quite short, but I am not sure how worn the q-switch is. And the power circuitry has to be overhauled because if I try too many pulses in too short time, the voltage multiplier capacitors blow.
The CO2 one is built into the laser cutter. Extracting the tube and the power supply should be quite easy. Then hacking the battery power for the laser tube (either directly if low-voltage DC from the cutter’s internal power supply, or a car inverter if it is fed from mains), coolant circuit (a pair of quarter-inch hoses and a pump), and housing (a bigger handheld “gun” for the laser tube and optics, a backpack or shoulder bag for the batteries and high voltage PSU, and an umbilical with the high voltage cables and cooling tubes). And/or a rifle scope and possibly a coaxial visible beam for aiming. It would be big, somewhat unwieldy, absorbed in the acrylic housing so it would just melt, bubble or char its surface without damage to the camera, and would require me to disassemble the cutter and wreck the optical alignment that is so far rather okay.
The third one would have to be picked from an assortment of various semiconductor crap or a He-Ne tube, but neither is powerful enough to burn through a paper sheet. But then, I need to buy that two-watt blue one anyway…
So far, the paintball ball with solvent looks easier.
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That’s a good point, and I mean it. Another good point is that, in other cases, the recording doesn’t start until a convinient time.
I’m not a cop, but I feel that they have a tough job. I know that there are some bad apples in the bunch, and some have grown apathetic over the years. But why is it that so many people on this site tend to be distrustful of the police? I’m not what you would call “caucasian”, but I’ve never had a run in with the police. I’ve been stopped a few times, explained myself, and then went on with my day. Have so many of you had differing experiences that you see cops as “the enemy”?
I’ll say it. Either nobody or everybody.
Pick a middle way, like now, with secrecy for those in power and no privacy for those with none, what the hell do you expect?
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I don’t feel that they are outright the “enemy” either. To me, they are like spiders. I can observe them from a distance, all the hard work they do, the service they provide, etc. But I don’t want them crawling on me or anywhere near me, for that matter.
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Isn’t the definition of “power” knowning something that someone else doesn’t? Isn’t the tradeoff for giving someone “power” over you, in some cases, safety and security? We, as a society, bestow power unto others in order to function better as a society. If this power is betrayed, then yes, there should be punishment. But would you want all that information out in the open? For anyone to see?
This discussion is going beyond cameras, and into NSA type stuff. Don’t you think that the people in power are caught in the same net, even if they’re told that they’re not?
But back to cameras. I hate 'em (for myself). But I’m a hypocrite. Whenever I see construction debris dumped in the park by when I live; whenever I see someone cut over the double yellow line on the FDR drive approaching the Brooklyn Bridge; whenever someone cuts the line for the bus - I think, “I wish there was a camera here!” And that’s why we have so many of them - everyone thinks the same way - if we caught someone doing something bad on camera, then people would behave themselves. But it doesn’t work this way for the most part. It’s too much trouble, and there’s not enough manpower for all but the most important crimes to slog through recordings. Sure, it might be done every once in awhile to make people think twice before doing something.
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I will try to briefly outline why I am generally distrustful of police.
Part of this is because of the underpinnings of the US legal system. It is adversarial in nature. Meaning that it is fundamentally based upon blame and contest rather than factual accounts. This is a very different outlook than, say, first determining the truth, and then what to do about it. Also, they spend much of their time and resources bothering people over victimless crime - which equates to authoritarian interference in people’s daily lives. Next is their schism between their public facade (protecting individual citizens), and what their charters actually involve (protecting The State, especially from it’s citizens). This is why they make it impossible to “opt out” of their protection - they can and do order individuals around, supposedly to protect these people’s safety, but are willing to kill these people if they do not comply. And they do not see any conflict of interests in doing so. Lastly, law enforcement and so-called “intelligence” function as a privileged class of person - with regards to access to information and services, use of force and surveillance, and all-around credibility. I do not believe in making de-facto classes of people, and certainly won’t pay them to subject me to this.
If police simply responded to emergencies and worked within easily-understood and publicized laws to help victims of wrongdoing, I would not mind having them around. But this is pretty remote from how they actually operate. I think that being a public servant is a quite noble vocation. But when The State decides that it has interests of its own, it distances itself from the public. The public become seen as a source of money, statistics to rationalize, and resources to control. And the police become their hands upon the body politic towards this end. They are “hired help” with guns who answer to themselves, which is about as pleasant and safe to have around as it sounds like.
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Cameras can be used for good, think of all the kids that go missing and there is a breadcrumb trail of their movements… so we could argue there should be more surveillance cameras… but then we’re propelled to living in 1984 and then MY business can become the NSA’s business when they decide they don’t like my attitude.
So we should all be putting up cameras watching our little space in the world, the SD card gets overwritten again and again. So when the police ask if you saw a missing girl you say ‘no, but my camera might have’ and you become a force for good in the world. We catch women stealing lawns or putting cats in bins… or police men beating up kids on the street.
WE should be reclaiming the technology and using it for good. If 5% of the UK had their own camera pointing into their garden we could happily smash all the cameras in every town. The French smash up any speeding camera they see, the government shouldn’t be able to spy on the people who elected them…
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That was a well thought out answer, and well-put. I have a question though. What “victimless” crimes are the police wasting their time on?
[quote=“WilliamA, post:11, topic:42833, full:true”] Tell us the exact level of 1984 you want.
[/quote]
“Tell us the exact level of 1984 you want.”
My perfect 1984 is…
Cameras for EVERY police officer, recording whenever they’re on duty, even in the station, wirelessly uploading to an encrypted central server that requires a court order to be viewed. Let the EFF look after the data, they’re about the only ones we can trust.
Cameras in public locations should use the same system, they don’t STOP crime, but they can be used in evidence. Again, court order to see it and the footage can’t be viewed ‘live’. Cameras in every prison and police cars. Same system.
Huge bug hunting rewards for people who reveal flaws in the system. Jail for people exploiting flaws.
All this data is deleted after 30 days unless flagged.
AND
Audio recordings of the head of state for every country 24/7 when they’re in office which are publicly available, encrypted, with the keys being released after 30 years… just enough time to put some of them in jail…
How did I do? Do you like my Utopia?? 
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Cameras wouldn’t have saved those kids, the broken lock was the problem.
You don’t understand, hostility to the police is not about the specific individuals. It’s a recognition that any people who are put in the role of police inevitably tend towards certain anti-social group behaviors. You can look at the Stanford Prison Experiments for sociological proof of this phenomenon.
It’s distrust of therole, not the individual. If a cop wants to be trusted and respected, all they need to do is give up the badge and gun. Rejoin the ranks of civilians who can’t kill and jail others with impunity, and we will welcome them as friends.
Also, it’s great that you’ve never been mistreated by the police - truly. But many others (including myself) have. And if there’s to be any humanity in our society, we need to concern ourselves with what our fellow man goes through just as much as the problems we face ourselves.
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Would 2 cameras allow for stereoscopic/3D surveillance?
This sounds interesting. The only thing is that to make it fair, everyone would have to wear cameras during working hours. But hey, in 10 years everyone will probably be wearing Google Glass, so who knows? 
These could mostly be labelled under the lurid umbrella of sex and drugs. But also many kinds of social organization, certain property and money usage. Things which are very fundamental to daily life, but many take for granted. The single greatest driver of surveillance technology and vague, secret laws of the 20th century was easily drugs. The US DOJ and prison system often increased in size by orders of magnitude by obsessing over what could easy be an honest business and self-regulating problem. Only the recent debates about gay marriage have finally inspired more people to finally ask why there are any laws about who can or cannot be married. Why is it anybody elses business? I have read quite a bit of law for a layperson, and I was surprised to find that rather a lot of it involved defining what proper family units and sexual relations are. I am not obsessed over sex and drugs myself, but if most of this was obviously consensual decision making, it would drastically simplify matters. I would rather not pay them to inconvenience us by saving us from our own personal decisions.
Much legislation in the US has been based around enforcing social norms, community standards of behavior, etc. Their philosophy is that the victim is “society itself”, and that the laws save people the embarrassment of being offended about witnessing things they find distasteful. In practice this has been a not-so-cunning way of bypassing the drafting of religiously-based laws. For instance, a state cannot draft a law based upon the dogma of a specific religion, but they do assert that since most people in the area subscribe to the ethics of that religious dogma, that it is a “community standard” which can be enforced. There is rather large-scale handwaving about the problem that somebody with a different religion, or no religion, is likely to have different ethics. Which references the above paragraph, as well as otherwise inexplicable laws such as what days or hours one’s store can be open for business.
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No, just the Police… they’re the ones with guns.
That’s a massive amount of data already, 6 billion people streaming video that’s kept for 30 days… someone else so the math!
ANARCHIST: Yeah. Look, next Tuesday, I’m gonna blow up a Panda in Croydon.
RIK: Yer, right on. Bloody zoos, who needs them?
ANARCHIST: No, a police car, you terminal wally!
RIK: [Nervously] Oh, the – the pigs?
ANARCHIST: Bastards
RIK: Yeah [Snort] Especially the few bad apples that spoil their otherwise spotless image.
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That was pretty damn well written.
Nope.
It may be a trade, if you give it. Less likely if the power is assumed, appropriated.
Sorry, but are you talking about the way you’d like things to be, as - e.g. - taught in your civics classes - or the way things actually are?
I’m pretty much certain that - barring a few exceptions - everyone in power believes themselves a good person working to protect their family or for the benefit of humanity. People are very good at rationalising their behaviour. They’re extraordinarily good at rationalising the horrors they can find themselves capable of visiting on others. They have to be extraordinarily good at the latter or they wouldn’t be human.
I can’t speak to the rest of your post because I have no strong feelings about the points you raise. I think I generally take the opposite views to the ones you espouse (e.g. from substituting a “don’t mind” for your “hate”, an “I suppose a camera here might help” for your “I wish there was a camera here”, etc) but am quite happy to share a world with you. 
