Originally Posted by
Alaskan Rover
A lot of the Black Lives Matter contingent is calling for police to wear body cameras.
How stupid can you get?
No. Police with body cams is NOT a good idea at all.
The Office of Justice Programs (the revamped version of LEAA) has already been researching and funding pilot programs for hooking up those body cams to facial recognition databases in real time for nearly instanteous cross-referencing of facial images. With such technology, a cop can be walking down the sidewalk while his body cam is automatically referencing EVERY passerby who walks by him. This has already been done in tests with success. Facial recognition tech is getting faster and more efficient every 6 months.
What we have here is one hell of a slippery slope. Who cares?, you say...it's just going to be used to nab drug dealers and thugs in the inner city. That part cracks me up, since a lot of inner city residents are the ones calling for body cams. Maybe they will start changing their minds when the arrest rate of blacks actually increases because of the facial-recognition driven body cams. :D :D bench warrants that before were not worth the hassle to pursue will now become easy arrests. Same with child support scofflaws, etc.
Look...I really couldn't care less about thugs and drug dealers, etc...they can and should go to prison...rid the streets of those scum....I don't care. But I DO care about the right to privacy...the right to walk down a street without some fucking cop body cam automatically scanning my face and referencing it against a data base. That is an invasion of privacy and I would go so far as to say it violates the 4th Amendment right to be free of undue search.
What's next? Walking down the sidewalk...and a flag comes up in some passing cop's Google Glass Next Generation eyepiece, that I've got unpaid parking tickets? That I hadn't paid my 2015 federal taxes? A slippery slope.
It figures and doesn't surprise me in the least, that the same group of people calling for body cams are the same group of people that burn down their own neighborhoods. Really smart. ;) Scholars!