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I have written an article regarding many aspects of the police use of body-worn cameras for work and during the process of researching the topic I became quite interested in the subject.

 

After writing the article, I thought that in conclusion the motivation for the implementation of the cameras was not to provide sound evidence for use in court but rather to take advantage of a current social issue and make a profit for the "police industrial complex" while appeasing the public to an extent.

 

The reason I came to that conclusion was because of the following:

 

1. Mount - results in shaky footage or if central officers arms and service weapon blocks the view.

 

2. Distortion

  •  Rolling shutter effect - produces a particular distortion explained here
  •  Barrel distortion from the wide angle lens - curves the outer edges of the frame  making measurements and perspectives difficult.
  •  Forced perspective - due to the close-up nature of the instances where the footage  will  be required, the suspects features will be geometrically distorted

3. The FBI can confiscate every single server in a private data center if only one client that uses that data is considered to be committing an illegal act. By moving video data into the private sector and not on government servers they can access any other data that is housed in that center, sorry for any amazon.com customers out there.

 

4. Resolution - to save money on storage costs (so they can spend more of that tasty civil forfeiture money on Martini machines) the resolution will be lower than we can technically achieve and this hurts evidence and also the number of pixels forensic enhancers have to work with.

 

To sum up my argument, I would say that if I were to design a device to record interactions between police and the public I would do it differently. Also, I want to make it clear that I think this is all an attempt at treating a symptom and not the core problem.

 

That being said I realised that this might not be the full scope on the move to using body-worn cameras, I received an article that said that these cameras will be "making their way into Iowa schools" to protect both the student and the teacher.

 

This is interesting and is the reason I am posting this thread.

 

Has the government used recent instances of lethal force to introduce the idea that body-worn cameras are better for the public? 

 

Have they set a precedent that makes it socially acceptable for all government officials to wear cameras and gather data on everyone to protect "both" parties? 

 

If this is the case, then it will become a huge cost to taxpayers, pushing money into selected corporations in the same way as the military industrial complex. 

 

Worse still is the possibility of lobbyists pushing for legislation that requires the use of this technology in everyday business. I can't even think what the rape culture and human rights lobbyists will propose in order to protect us from threats that don't exist. 

 

I am just one person with limited resources, but I would love for Stef and his researchers to do a video regarding this topic.

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