The SF Fire Chief needs to be invited to find a new job. All public servants should be mandated to have video and audio recordings taken during their interactions with the public. If the recordings are inappropriate for public release then that's a different matter than trying to prevent their valuable existence.
Her excuse that it "protects privacy" is not only ridiculous, it's insulting (that they think people will buy it).
I feel that this happens more and more, where leaders and elected officials will present completely transparent bold-faced lies to the public, with a straight face, when everyone involved (the speaker and the audience) knows it to be a lie, but because there is no practical or legal way to disprove the lie, it is presented anyways..
Whatever happened to integrity? Do you really think it just recently vanished?
To quote from Machiavelli's Il Principe, from the 1500's: "The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present."
Want to go earlier? Let's get Julius Caesar: “If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”
And I'm sure he wasn't the first one to say or think so, either. Integrity is not a quality we can ever assume in existence - the only thing that will guarantee a semblance of it is accountability.
Too cynical, and perhaps dangerously so, yet plausible.
Everyone is subject to temptation and self-justification. Anyone given too large a pass for "integrity" will start to veer to self-aggrandizement of some sort. That doesn't make people inherently bad, it does mean we all benefit from perspective and inspection.
To me the take-away is that an assertion of incorruptibility is a leading indicator of trouble. Anything you aren't allowed to question or discuss is a breeding ground for trouble.
I'd be cynical if I assumed integrity didn't exist. Some people seem to have it, and many more strive for it.
But I'd be hopelessly naive if I ever assumed it to exist, or if I assumed public displays of "integrity" were connected to an internal state.
These latter assumptions might be true, but the cost of them being not true is too high, and the occurrence of "not true" is too frequent. Or, shorter, "Trust, but verify" :)
That's a really good question. I think the answer is partly that it was never there to begin with, just a thin veneer to cover the filth underneath. The difference is that there is now not even a pretence at integrity any more.
No, the difference is that we now have the Internet, which serves as a safe place to point these things out and spread the word. In the past, it was a lot easier to sweep it under the rug.
In this case, privacy could be a concern. If an officer is wearing a body camera during a search, suddenly there's a permanent record of the inside of your home and plenty more opportunity to spot unrelated crimes to hold against you.
I was thinking more of the barge-down-the-door-without-a-warrant sort of search.
I'm overly sensitive to it because I live in a college town with a 4th amendment violating county ordinance. If the police suspect underage drinking, they can enter the premises and arrest occupants for any other violations they see.
In the recent "I am a Seattle cop, AMA" over in /r/seattle, the officer said: "I'm torn on body cameras and confused about the public perception of them. People really didn't want us to have a drone that could fly for 10 minutes but they want us to bring cameras into their homes." [1]
I will admit that I am both pro-body cam and anti-drone, but I'd never thought of it that way.
I don't want police officers in my home. However if police officers do come into my home then I absolutely want them to have a body camera so they can be held responsible for any actions they take.
I agree on the first claim, but to the second, it is a two-edged sword. If the police are in your home, they may or may not see anything interesting. If they have video to play back, they may get a second chance to look for something that they wouldn't have had.
I don't deny the benefit we seek, but there are risks, as well.
But shouldn't it be the case that if police is given a search warrant, we (as people, in general) want them to notice anything and everything there is to notice?
This is also something I would reply to your sibling comment as well, I think many would prefer a footage of their state instead of a description of it from a police officer who might be confused/distracted/filling-up-the-gaps. It is both more objective and more just. Jury should be allowed to see as it was and not just as it is displayed during the trial.
I admit I wasn't thinking of search warrants. I was thinking of the times where I've had police in my domicile, all of which were in response to calls for assistance.
I fear the police more when they are in my home than after the fact. Police brutality, planted evidence, and plain old dishonesty have more potential to harm me than the truth.
'RyJones made an argument in response to you that is at least something to think about; another that I have heard is that without cameras, if you get arrested, then your lawyer at least has the chance to clean you up and get you in a suit before the court and jury see you. No such chance if your arrest was recorded.
I think it's interesting that none of the other replies to this have hit on what I think is the truly pertinent difference.
When implemented in an ideal fashion, body cameras would go straight to archival storage that could not be opened without a warrant. The idea is not to be watching it all the time, but to preserve a record that can be used to investigate complaints.
I don't know if that's likely. But even absent that, simple numbers dictate that most of the footage will go unwatched. You'd need a number of officers similar to those out in the field to see it all.
With drones, every moment is being watched and analyzed. There is little chance that drone footage will serve to help someone in a complaint against the police.
The difference is the balance of power. I'm anti-drone because I believe they'd be used for indiscriminate surveillance or to gather specific evidence the police want. I would find it implausible that they'd be used to vindicate a civilian or to "watch the watchers". The presumption is different with body cameras. If standard practice is to wear them and record at all times, they should be used as evidence of the truth either way - whether that condemns the police of justifies their actions. I'm okay with anything that would prove the truth neutrally and impartially, as long as it respected reasonable bounds of privacy. If body cameras could only be used when the police chose to, I would be against them as though they were drones.
Exactly. If privacy is the true concern, the solution is to forbid the unofficial mass release of helmet-cam footage, and set up specific exceptions: to expose wrongdoing, when subpoenaed by a judge, etc.
Please see this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235004 (JshWright's comment, buried down in the comments)
The camera was a personal camera (Like a GoPro), not an officially provided one.
I think this completely validates the fire chief's actions.
> All public servants should be mandated to have video and audio recordings taken during their interactions with the public.
That would become extremely complicated when you consider the fact that vast majority of interactions firefighters and paramedics have are considered protected health information under HIPAA
