Police Body-Cams Shut Down for Inauguration and Womens March
Police Body-Cams Shut Down for Inauguration and Women’s March
Trump’s inauguration and the next day’s protest won’t be recorded by police body-cams. The ACLU, maybe surprisingly, is backing the decision, saying it protects protesters from surveillance. But what if it gets ugly?
Thor Benson
01.19.17 1:13 AM ET
During the presidential inauguration on Friday and during the “Women’s March on Washington” the following day, police body cameras will be off. Outrage!
Many activists have expressed vitriol over the blackout. “Civil rights groups are concerned that the police will violate their rights during the inauguration protests so they intend to record their behavior,” a viral post on LawOfficer.com reads. “Meanwhile, the ACLU is demanding that the police turn off their body worn cameras during the events.”
The ACLU was targeted in viral posts about this because it supported a D.C. law from 2015 that dictates police can only turn cameras on “for the purpose of documenting violations of law and police actions, as an aid to future coordination and deployment of law enforcement units, and for training purposes.”
Police cannot turn them on simply to monitor people exercising their First Amendment rights. According to the ACLU, it’s for protection of civil liberties.
“From the very beginning, the question about body cameras is: Will they actually be serving as an oversight mechanism to help reduce abuse by police officers, or are they going to become just another surveillance tool that serves the interests of law enforcement?” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told The Daily Beast. “One of the concerns, among other things, is these are roving government video cameras.”
Stanley explained there’s “unfortunately a long history of law enforcement doing surveillance on people just because of the views that they hold.” Black Lives Matter has expressed concerns over this in the past. Stanley and the ACLU worry that giving police detailed images of everyone who attended a protest could be dangerous.
One danger is that police can run images obtained during a peaceful protest through facial recognition software so they could identify nearly everyone who attended. Over 117 million people are in a facial recognition database that police in many states have access to. You might regret taking so many selfies and posting them online. That could mean they’d be able to accuse activists of crimes, perhaps wrongly, if anything bad happens, and they’d essentially have a list of local dissidents.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/19/police-body-cams-shut-down-for-inauguration-and-women-s-march.html
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