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by Grakel 2174 days ago
Cameras record facts. What if body cam makers stopped providing police body cams?

I can see not sharing the videos to the public, who are notorious for bad and racist judgement, but if the police are racist, that's a police problem, not an evidence problem.
3 comments
kerkeslager 2174 days ago
> Cameras record facts.

What I do in the bathroom is factual, but just because something is factual doesn't mean the police have a right to see it.

> What if body cam makers stopped providing police body cams?

Are you proposing that Ring owners should be subject to the same standard of transparency as people that the government issues guns to?

> if the police are racist, that's a police problem, not an evidence problem.

Uh, it's a societal problem, that society (which includes Amazon) needs to address.

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Grakel 2174 days ago
Ring cameras record in public, not your bathroom. What a straw man.
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kerkeslager 2173 days ago
It's not a straw man, because I'm not accusing anyone of making a pro-giving-police-recordings-of-bathrooms argument. On the contrary, I'm assuming we all agree that giving police recordings of what we do in the bathroom would be invasive. This is the basis of a further argument.

Ironically, accusing me of making a straw man argument in this case, is a straw man argument. ;)

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Barrin92 2173 days ago
The issue is of course the extremely broad definition of 'public' in the US which includes virtually everything but your bathroom.

If someone calls the police on you because your paranoid or racist neighbour caught you on their doorbell camera and called the cops because he thought you looked like you 'didn't belong' in the neighbourhood that happened in public, but it's obviously extremely problematic and a recipe for self-imposed policing virtually everywhere.

And that's not actually a hypothetical but something that already happened. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyvzd/amazons-home-secur...)

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p49k 2173 days ago
It is a police problem, and the purpose of initiatives like this is to make clear that our government is failing us and we need to start using other methods to get the problem of racism in policing under control, including pressuring the private sector to deny them tools that they are seemingly incapable of not abusing when given access.
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jimktrains2 2173 days ago
Cameras record evidence, not facts. That distinction is important to keep in mind.
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