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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Body cams are a silly idea in the first place. If you're so distrustful of your police that you feel the need to place cams on them, then you need to go back to the drawing board and address the root problem - the trustworthiness of your police force.

There's no reason to treat cops as second-class citizens. There's no evidence to suggest widespread power-abuse, despite all the FUD from BLM. Are there some bad apples? Sure, but there are bad apples in every profession and steps like that only punish good officers and make corrupt officers more careful when they perform misdeeds.

You cannot neuter the power of every profession of authority. All you're going to do is build instinctive and reflexive mistrust of anyone in authority before they've done anything wrong, just like the reflexive mistrust BLM has whenever anyone interacts with an African-American.

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I hear the "bad apple" thing a lot when it comes to discussions of bad cops, and it's usually in the context you're using it, e.g., "sure, there are some bad apples, but you can't hold everyone responsible for them."

Yet the actual old folk wisdom was "one bad apple can spoil the barrel," or as Benjamin Franklin rephrased it in Poor Richard's Almanack, "the rotten apple spoils his companion." The entire point is that we don't get to just say "it's one bad apple." A barrel with one bad apple in it quickly becomes a barrel of bad apples.

The uproar we've seen isn't just about example after example of police brutality, poor treatment of minorities, and abuse of power. It's about the overwhelming resistance among the police to change, to accountability, even to self-examination. It's about how the reaction, by and large, to "bad apples" isn't to say "we need to get rid of that one," but rather to say "we need to protect our own."

We don't treat police as second-class citizens; we entrust them with extraordinary power and latitude. In return, shouldn't we be holding them to an extraordinarily high standard?

I'd agree.

What seems to be missing is the populist support on both sides.

Imagine you're a police officer standing next to a 'bad apple' - you should be put in a situation where helping to prosecute the 'bad apple' is the easiest option for you to take. I don't think it's that easy. I've had plenty of jobs where I was working with an arseshole, but I've never taken it to HR. Maybe most I've ever done, is just ensured I don't have to work near them - solves my problem.

I think that's true, but I also think there's unique, or at least highly specific, aspects to police culture which also come in here. It's come out that a lot of police training is very explicitly "us vs. them" in its approach -- reinforcing the message that every call you go out on could be your last, every person you interact with could be a dangerous criminal, you should be prepared to do whatever it takes to get the bad guys and other officers are your only line of defense. So it's not as much "if I take this guy's misconduct to HR, they won't do anything anyway" as "if I take this guy's misconduct to HR, I will have betrayed my fellow officer." And it's that, that "thin blue line" mentality, that really needs to be tackled.

In the US you don't have populism, you have Red Team Populism and Blue Team Populism.

Police reform has been tagged Blue Team populism, so Red Team populists oppose it on principle.

What? A body cam is useful for the same reason that AWS CloudTrail and other audit logs are useful-- auditing? What part of policing necessitates that it is done in secret?

> but there are bad apples in every profession

A "bad apple" software engineer probably over-reports hours or is neglectful in their job. A "bad apple" cashier probably skims off the top of sales. A "bad apple" executive probably enriches their personal wealth.

A "bad apple" cop probably results in ruining the lives of other people through wrongful arrests, excessive force, or other means.

Some people simply should be held to a higher standard because of the responsibilities of their position. When you can quite literally be the arbiter of life and death at times, you should be held to a higher standard.

> If you're so distrustful of your police that you feel the need to place cams on them, then you need to go back to the drawing board and address the root problem - the trustworthiness of your police force.

I think we definitely should do that, agreed, but when we're talking about people who are empowered to deprive others of their freedom -- or even their lives -- I want more than just "we've fixed our hiring practices and training to ensure our officers are trustworthy". Sure, ok, great, but I want more than just your word on it. I want controls put in place to reduce the possibility of abuses, and when there are abuses, I want it to be difficult for there to be no record of those abuses.

> There's no reason to treat cops as second-class citizens.

This sort of verification and monitoring would not be unique to a police force. The whole "second-class citizens" thing is just FUD and an attempt to distract from the problem at hand. Any government agency that deals with sensitive information has controls in place to try to stop bad employees from doing bad things. Some companies do that too, depending on the kind of stuff they deal with. That extends to other sorts of controls, like at most tech companies, most employees should not have access to billing information, or even deployment permissions for services not owned by their teams. Some of this is just to prevent mistakes, but these controls are also there to prevent malicious employees from doing bad things. I believe some of the ISO and security certifications my company has requires controls like this, even.

There is implicit reason to mistrust anyone handed a deadly weapon and the ability to kill people or take away their freedom. 1 in 100 bad cops is more than enough reason for all of them to wear body cams because that one can trivially ruin any number of lives.

It's farcical to suppose that recording their conduct an essential element of accountability is a cross too heavy to bear when life and death and citizens freedom are on the line. Everyone should in fact have a reflexive mistrust of authority because the majority of the human race lacks much of an internal moral compass and can be said to be "good" mostly within the confines of a function system that holds people accountable for meeting objective standards and worse power attracts the corruptible.

You could do well to delete half the buzzwords from your post and come up with reasons in their place.

I suggest you read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing

which goes into great detail many different times where police abuse power, and why things need to change.

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