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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Is ubiqutious camera technology an equaliser or not? I used to believe it was the fact that it used to be "your word against mine" which largely prevented prosecution of state actors.

And that camera evidence in the future would change that. Now, I'm not so sure. I feel there is a lot of non-refutable behaviour caught on camera which is never prosecuted and just brushed over.

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Ultimately the problem is that many people are happy to believe what they want to believe, and no amount of video or audio evidence will change their mind about it. There are sometimes people who just need to be convinced, but the way things run these days, those people usually aren't the ones in power.

Pervasive video recording means we get to see more of the day-to-day atrocities being committed but that doesn't matter much in most cases because the people in power already knew and don't care.

Being negative is easier than being positive. It is far easier for most people to simply believe that the "other" party is evil. Until we can find a way to teach people how to reason about hard topics, we'll have a divided nation, which makes it easy for awful people to come into power.

Video footage can be misleading. Different Video perspective and knowledge of events unfolding before the incident is necessary to accurately convey what happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/01/us/police-bod...

Hopefully the video evidence will force a breaking point sooner than "your word against mine", but, like you, I'm not as sure as I used to be.

I certainly feel like we catch more bad behavior than we have in the past. If we think of it like a funnel, we're stuffing more cases in the top.

We (obviously) need to do more downstream in the funnel. As great as lines are about voting carefully, that doesn't really seem to fix the problem. Maybe pooling money and naming and shaming the people who don't chase these cases? Of course, that also risks the angry mob problem.

IMO cameras are more useful as a tool to defend yourself against the state rather than to bring charges against the state. The government doesn't want to bring charges against those enforcing it's laws as that would cause other enforcers to be less willing to do the work.

Video might help force a debate about the behavior and roles of police.

But the only technology that can really fix this is training. And changing the mentality of law enforcement in the US.

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