I feel that this happens more and more, where leaders and elected officials will present completely transparent bold-faced lies to the public, with a straight face, when everyone involved (the speaker and the audience) knows it to be a lie, but because there is no practical or legal way to disprove the lie, it is presented anyways..
Whatever happened to integrity?
To quote from Machiavelli's Il Principe, from the 1500's: "The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present."
Want to go earlier? Let's get Julius Caesar: “If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”
And I'm sure he wasn't the first one to say or think so, either. Integrity is not a quality we can ever assume in existence - the only thing that will guarantee a semblance of it is accountability.
Everyone is subject to temptation and self-justification. Anyone given too large a pass for "integrity" will start to veer to self-aggrandizement of some sort. That doesn't make people inherently bad, it does mean we all benefit from perspective and inspection.
To me the take-away is that an assertion of incorruptibility is a leading indicator of trouble. Anything you aren't allowed to question or discuss is a breeding ground for trouble.
But I'd be hopelessly naive if I ever assumed it to exist, or if I assumed public displays of "integrity" were connected to an internal state.
These latter assumptions might be true, but the cost of them being not true is too high, and the occurrence of "not true" is too frequent. Or, shorter, "Trust, but verify" :)
That's a really good question. I think the answer is partly that it was never there to begin with, just a thin veneer to cover the filth underneath. The difference is that there is now not even a pretence at integrity any more.
I'm overly sensitive to it because I live in a college town with a 4th amendment violating county ordinance. If the police suspect underage drinking, they can enter the premises and arrest occupants for any other violations they see.
I will admit that I am both pro-body cam and anti-drone, but I'd never thought of it that way.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1jp0hu/iama_spd_off...
I think the difference is that the drone is more of a mass-surveillance device where the individual cameras aren't (quite as much).
A good analogue might be a police dash camera versus car-mounted license plate readers. They are similar but meant for very different uses.
I don't deny the benefit we seek, but there are risks, as well.
This is also something I would reply to your sibling comment as well, I think many would prefer a footage of their state instead of a description of it from a police officer who might be confused/distracted/filling-up-the-gaps. It is both more objective and more just. Jury should be allowed to see as it was and not just as it is displayed during the trial.
When implemented in an ideal fashion, body cameras would go straight to archival storage that could not be opened without a warrant. The idea is not to be watching it all the time, but to preserve a record that can be used to investigate complaints.
I don't know if that's likely. But even absent that, simple numbers dictate that most of the footage will go unwatched. You'd need a number of officers similar to those out in the field to see it all.
With drones, every moment is being watched and analyzed. There is little chance that drone footage will serve to help someone in a complaint against the police.
I think this completely validates the fire chief's actions.
That would become extremely complicated when you consider the fact that vast majority of interactions firefighters and paramedics have are considered protected health information under HIPAA