Imagine the scene.
A police baton charge.
Imagine it being filmed by some leading action movie director: the noise, the speed, the aggression, the sense of determination and danger, the anticipation of impact.
The police being portrayed as if they were Roman legionnaires or a rampant cavalry.
You watch, and you tense as they approach their target.
And...
...the target calmly raises their camera phone.
The charge comes to an abrupt halt.
I do wish someone would film or animate such a scene.
The recent video footage of police misconduct featured on this blog and elsewhere has revealed sickening and disappointing police behaviour.
We have seen thugs such as PC Simon Harwood, PCSO Peter Lightfoot, and now Sergeant Mark Andrews violently attack members of the public.
It is likely that such behaviour has always been shown by some police officers, but only now is it being captured and broadcast.
This is a welcome development, as it is almost impossible to otherwise individual police officers to account for their conduct in office.
It would be better if there were functioning mechanisms to otherwise hold individual police officers to account; but until there are such mechanisms, the responsible promotion of such video footage seems to be the best way of in turn promoting police accountability for their seemingly relentless violent misconduct towards defenceless members of the public.
Of course, the majority of police officers should not mind being filmed whilst they discharge their public duties with the coercive powers they are uniquely entrusted with in our society.
After all, if someone is behaving lawfully then presumably they must have nothing to hide...
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Sunday, 5 September 2010
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13 comment(s):
Perhaps a more balanced view would be to provide a bit more media space to the hours of CCTV footage produced regularly at courts to show the acts of violence and aggression that officers regularly police on a Friday and Saturday night.
I welcome any filming of my activity and have frequently arrested violent offenders on CCTV.
Unfortunately those assaults don't seem to reach Youtube.
To couple that with a crusade on "the seemingly relentless violent misconduct " of police on the basis of 3 pieces of footage from the last 2 years appears to slightly exaggerate the extent of the problem.
Tang0
I'm sure many potential criminals are deterred mainly by the possibility of detection. Hopefully, the same will apply here.
Small point: Peter Lightfoot is (was?) a special, not a PCSO.
Small point: Peter Lightfoot is (was?) a special, not a PCSO.
There is a simple way to prevent most police abuses. Require that police wear a recording device, both camera and sound, at all times. Suitable encryption assures that data from one device can not be substituted for that from another device. Recorded data is saved for 5 to 10 years - longer if some reason exists to keep it longer.
Still pictures could be captured 5 per second and saved after 2 minutes at 5 per minute unless loud noises i.e. gunshot or much movement is sensed by the device. However, in-device data retention algorithms are not my point here.
The individual officers can not disable their devices. Yes, it continues to run on bathroom breaks. Only when a question arises is the data examined. The officer has READ ONLY access to his/her own recordings. This will assist in the production of correct written reports.
I asked one officer, a transit cop, about this said that finally someone would be able to appreciate the nonsense he has to put up with.
Such a device was possible 10 years ago. Advances in microelectronics make this much easier and less expensive today. I would put the device inside a badge. Call it a badge camera.
I bloody love technology.
Of course, footage like this is why one suspects the police don't want to be filmed and photographed...
At some point they'll grok that *everyone* at a demo or even minor street aggro is filming them, and either clean up or suddenly there'll be sudden massive confiscations of phones 'for detection purposes'...
(remember, kiddies, to swallow your micro SD card with a swig of water)
The instance you give involves police officers but I can envisage some mental health service users wanting to use cameras to record violent incidents in hospitals and secure units. I have never heard of this happing. I am foundation trust governor but I can see that it might happen. I am not sure how staff would respond. Management certainly would not like the idea of material going on YouTube. There would be concerns about patient confidentiality. I suspect some nurses might immediately want to confiscate cameras.That would be regretable if the camera contained evidence of real abuse but there might be legitimate reasons for taking the camera away.
People do expect privacy in hospital, especially psychiatric hospitals. Most people do not want pictures of themselves to be taken.
I also wonder what would happen if footage were taken in a prison of some critical incident. There are plenty of phones behind bars.
I'm afraid I will never subscribe to the "Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear" argument. I deprecate some of the recent and not so recent actions by those we were raised to trust, but I have to maintain trust in their management to weed out and prosecute the bad ones.
I think turning the exception into the expectation is incorrect and propagandist.
Problems
1. It would be very hard to stop a corrupt police office from damaging his recording equipment.
2. The storage requirements would be enormous.
While I don't disagree with the general thrust of your point, it's worth noting that in the most recent case of Sergeant Andrews' assault, there was indeed a "functioning mechanism to hold individual police officers to account". The footage was recorded on the police station's CCTV; the incident was immediately reported by a colleague to Andrews' supervisor (and the victim given the medical treatment she needed); he was suspended, charged and convicted and - due process having taken its course - will be sentenced in a few days time and will undoubtedly lose his job.
You can't hope to prevent all instances of unjustified violence by those who, as you say, have a unique level of coercive power (especially when they perform a stressful, frustrating job in which they are frequently themselves the victims of violence) - you can only hope to have systems that will catch it and punish it. While it's certainly worrying that these systems too often fail to reach a conclusion that seems to serve justice, on this occasion they appear to have worked as well as could be hoped.
In the U.S. police regularly arrest people for using recording equipment to record police behaviour. E.g. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/08/the_omnipotence_of_law_enforce.php
I've often thought there must be a large market for a camera that streams video direct to the 'net, so that the evidence is immediately out of reach of anyone who might want to destroy it.
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