Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.
Tell ya a little story… A story about a job I had. A job that’s statistically more dangerous than being a cop. More likely you get killed doing it, more likely to kill someone else while doing it. And relevantly, this job included a camera…
That job was a long haul driver. I was looking to be a local driver, but most of those companies don’t want new kids, so you gotta go do the long haul thing for a bit first. So I drove long haul for a year. They gave me a brand new truck, with a brand new camera in it.
Now this camera didn’t have no off button. Didn’t have an SD card in it. If I got pulled over, I had absolutely no way whatsoever to access the video from it. I had no control over this camera at all…
Well, sorta. I could access any “incidents” it saved. Those incidents would be that I took a corner too fast, or I strayed out of my lane for longer than 5 seconds, or I hit the brakes a little too heartily… then it would send some guy in a cubicle a message that i was a horrible driver and attach a 20 second video clip. Usually it was a light turned yellow and I was empty and knew I could stop quickly and chose to do so, which would upset mr safety guy a little but fuckin whatever. There was some points involved and a score, and it never amounted to jack, I drive local now :)
So anyway, that’s the story, and hopefully the point, because it should be blatantly obvious what the point is ;)
Tell ya a little story… A story about a job I had. A job that’s statistically more dangerous than being a cop. More likely you get killed doing it, more likely to kill someone else while doing it. And relevantly, this job included a camera…
That job was a long haul driver. I was looking to be a local driver, but most of those companies don’t want new kids, so you gotta go do the long haul thing for a bit first. So I drove long haul for a year. They gave me a brand new truck, with a brand new camera in it.
Now this camera didn’t have no off button. Didn’t have an SD card in it. If I got pulled over, I had absolutely no way whatsoever to access the video from it. I had no control over this camera at all…
Well, sorta. I could access any “incidents” it saved. Those incidents would be that I took a corner too fast, or I strayed out of my lane for longer than 5 seconds, or I hit the brakes a little too heartily… then it would send some guy in a cubicle a message that i was a horrible driver and attach a 20 second video clip. Usually it was a light turned yellow and I was empty and knew I could stop quickly and chose to do so, which would upset mr safety guy a little but fuckin whatever. There was some points involved and a score, and it never amounted to jack, I drive local now :)
So anyway, that’s the story, and hopefully the point, because it should be blatantly obvious what the point is ;)