Originally Posted by
YorkNecromancer
Actually, what I'd do is sell all this military nonsense the police don't need -tanks, machine guns and whatnot - then spend that money on personal cameras which every police officer would wear at all times and in all places.
These cameras would automatically log their footage to a personal black box recorder built into the officer's body armour, as well as sending it (where possible) via wifi to an external server. That server would be run by each police department's Internal Affairs division; officers could have access to their footage, but the actual saved footage would be the property of women and men they don't know personally, to reduce the risk of it being tampered with. That way, in any shooting, there is a record of exactly what happened from the viewpoint of every officer at the scene, and we have a much clearer (though still imperfect) account of events as they transpired.
I would also consider live-streaming officer's feeds at random onto a dedicated, nationwide website - a bit like Youtube, or the channels people livestream games across - so that any ordinary citizen can observe police officers as they act. Officers wouldn't be observed all the time, but they would never know when they were being observed. Who watches the watchmen? Us. All of us. We have the capacity to do this now. If a citizen observes an officer breaking the law, they call a dedicated telephone line, and inform the desk of the date, time and officer number of the event in question. It would work like Wikipedia. If you wished to log a complaint against a police officer, you would have to give your personal details, to prevent fraud and false accusations. Complaints would be logged with Internal Affairs, or possibly some oversight committee, so that an officer observed commiting a crime in Texas couldn't hunt down the woman in Los Angeles who reported her.
I would make it an act of gross misconduct to be 'on the clock' and not wearing your camera as an officer. Keeping your camera working would be your personal responsibility. Failure to maintain your camera or have work carried out on it, getting lenses replaced after they've been broken, whatever, would mean an immediate suspension and investigation, pending a meeting with a peer review board. If you want all the power there is over ordinary citizens, if you want it, you can have it. But with that great power comes great accountability. If you have the right to police us, we have the right to police you.
The police and government are always telling us, the commoners beneath their boots, that if we're innocent of any crime, we have nothing to hide. We're filmed, photgraphed, monitored, our emails are hacked, and all in the name of keeping people alive. So okay. I would make them stand by those words. Let them be held as accountable at all times and in all places as they would hold us.