Taser's ear-mounted AXON camera for law enforcement
Recently, the San Jose, Calif., Police Department announced that it will soon begin a one-year experiment with Taser’s officer-mounted AXON cameras. The cameras are small enough to fit on top of an earpiece and record video and audio, essentially recording everything the officer sees and hears while the camera is on. Although officers have the ability to turn the devices on or off, they do not have the ability to erase or edit what has been recorded. And Chief Rob Davis says the department will institute policies regarding when an officer should or should not turn the devices on.
The Ubiquity of Cameras
The decision to implement the program comes after the San Jose PD and other many other law enforcement agencies across the country have been involved in cases of police misconduct that were captured on digital and cell phone cameras. One only has to do a quick search on YouTube to find a citizen-captured video of police officers. But these videos are often edited to only show alleged police misconduct, not what led up to the incident, skewing public perception in favor of the victim, not the officers.
A Camera Can Be an Officer’s Best Friend
At a recent IACP 2009 panel discussion, Steven Drizin, Legal Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, and other panelists agreed that video recording interrogations and confessions was one of the best ways to prevent the police from accusations of misconduct and coercion. In fact, after Illinois passed a law requiring all interrogations to be video taped, motions to suppress suspect confessions at trial dropped to nearly zero. So, recording out in the field can be an officer’s best friend, and the San Jose PD hopes that this type of recording will help protect officers and give the department a more complete picture of any incident officers encounter.
The Death of Privacy
On the other hand, the policy on how the videos will be handled is a little unclear. Representatives from the mayor’ s office say that the videos would fall under the same policies as 911 tapes, “which can be requested but often are not released by police” (source). Still, video of suspects, their vehicles, or the insides of their homes, seems a bit more sensitive than audio of a 911 call. And questions about who sees the video, who handles it, and who controls it become very important to all citizens who value their personal privacy.
Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, recently wrote in a CNN.com article that “privacy is dead” due to the proliferation of social media. He even cites a personal video recording device (much like the AXON, but for citizens) as an example of the way that we are all constantly being monitored and monitoring others. Is the AXON another way in which citizens will be recorded, uploaded, and shared with others without even knowing it? Could this new technology result in a slew of privacy lawsuits against the San Jose PD?
“Wait Till I Tell My Wife”
Obviously these are issues that the San Jose PD will have to wrestle with over the next year as they discover the benefits and pitfalls of widespread video recording of their officers’ actions. I have no doubt that they are sensitive to these issues and will work to protect citizens rights whenever possible. But I also wonder if somewhere, sometime, a crime analyst or civilian employee will see my face on a video screen from a routine traffic stop and think, “I knew that guy in High School. Wait till I tell my wife about this.”
What do you think about San Jose’s AXON pilot program and the way it may or may not impact citizen privacy? Leave a comment.
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