Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword

Earlier this week, I was interviewed by a reporter that was writing about the effects of technology on law enforcement. More specifically, her article was on video recording equipment, and how it had changed the way officers do their work.

We had a great talk, and she wrote a good article. Afterword, I realized that being recorded has become such a normal part of police life that we almost don't think about it anymore - and that is a problem.

In ancient times - like the 1970s and 1980s - police officers went about their daily tasks without much worry that someone was going to photograph them. In fact, every once in a while, a news crew or some other individual would start filming officers at work, and would end up with their cameras or film seized, and maybe even get arrested for "interfering".

During those times, it was pretty normal for phone calls to and from the police station to be recorded, and for radio transmissions to be taped. Still, unless you worked in dispatch, you often didn't think about the fact that your conversations were being recorded. If you did work in dispatch, and wanted to make a personal call, you left the room, and found a line that wasn't recorded. We were very aware that we were being recorded.

Jump forward a few years, to the point where we started seeing dashboard mounted video cameras in police cars. That was a pretty novel thing for several years, to the point that members of the public and even officers often didn't think about being recorded, and many did things that were filmed and used against them in court - one well known incident regarding a vicious assault on a female patrol officer by a man she had stopped for a traffic violation comes to mind. As the man punched and savagely beat the officer, his little daughter begged him to stop. As he got back into his vehicle to flee the scene, he could be heard telling his daughter, "Baby, I can't go back to jail." Of course, the tape was used to send him exactly there.

Then the growth of the 24 hour news stations, and LAPD's arrest of Rodney King, combined to begin our long national nightmare of seeing sensationally edited pieces of video repeated a thousand times a day, thus giving - and reinforcing - the impression that cops were beating people on an hourly basis.

So, here we are. Most police cars are equipped with video recorders. TASERs can be had with recording capability; cameras can be mounted on firearms, and several companies have introduced "wearable" camera systems. It seems like we are recording everything we do.

That's probably fair, since the public is walking around with digital cameras in their cell phones, and even in their eyeglass frames. Hours of high quality, digital video can be grabbed with camcorders the size of a pack of cigarettes. There is a video surveillance camera in every business, and on many street corners.

In our desire to monitor streets, stores, and each other, in order to reduce crime, and to protect ourselves from accusations of wrongdoing, we have created a kind of Orwellian existence. There is much that is good about that, since we often need to review video footage in order to locate a suspect or a lost child, and on more than one occasion, officers that have been accused of being rude, impolite or worse, have been vindicated by a quick review of their in-car video.

However, as with almost anything of value, there is a dark side to all of this recording and monitoring. Yes, the tape can be used to prove that we did what we were supposed to do or that we didn't do what we should not have done - but sometimes we forget that in between those incidents there is all that other time; that down time. It's time when we are just driving around or walking around, and during that time we are being recorded.