Back when there were taglines here, mine was, “Orwell was an optimist.”
No, this diary is not another tired comparison of the current government with the Big Brother dictatorship described in 1984. It is about another aspect of that amazing and prescient novel.
In the day when video was in its infancy, Orwell imagined that eventually the government would have the capability of placing a video camera on every street corner. He was right about that. What is more interesting is what he didn’t see coming
Unlimited video capability is here, but ironically, it is not the government using most of it. There are not enough police resources to monitor everyday activities in the entirety of the public sphere. Instead, businesses and citizens all have adopted video technology. Citizens because it comes with their mobile phones, and businesses because they have the right to see what takes place on their premises. These non-government videos have often been instrumental in solving crimes for which there were no human witnesses, or in which witnesses disagreed on what took place.
While Orwell may have had the imagination to predict network television, there is no possibility that he could have imagined the Internet, YouTube, social networks, email, and the unlimited capability of ordinary citizens to take and distribute interesting video to the entire world in minutes.
It’s no secret that the police have never been above roughing up the usual suspects, but who believes the usual suspects about that, and who even cares? Petty criminals lie about everything, right? They must have mouthed off, or resisted arrest. There was obviously a reason they had it coming.
The further irony of the video revolution, which Orwell may have enjoyed, is that instead of the citizens fearing the government’s video capability, unlimited citizen video has made it impossible for much of law enforcement to deny what had always been easy to make go away.
When body-worn cameras became cheap and obvious tools for the public to hold police accountable, it was predictable that there would be push back from law enforcement. First there were objections to wearing them at all.
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When that barrier fell, objections to making the video public. The reason for keeping police video from being an open public record was that on occasion innocent citizens may appear in images that violate privacy.
Patrick J. Lynch, the union president, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit that the releases were arbitrary and illegal.
“This footage has serious implications not only for the safety and due process rights of police officers, but for the privacy and rights of members of the public, as well,”
These citizens may of course waive any such right in the interest of justice, since they may also be considered witnesses, and their testimony required. The important part is not whether the video is made public, but that there is a record of what the police officer does.
My experience with filing a written report of police misconduct is that it was laughed off, because the investigation is not independent, and the investigators are often friends with the accused officer. A video record of an event is harder to make to away.
Ironically for Orwell’s vision, it is now the police who are more uncomfortable with their movements being monitored on video than ordinary citizens. Citizens assume that their public movements are not secret, but police have always assumed that they are the arbiters of public conduct, and that their views on public events were unquestioned.
For hundreds of citizens, it is only the video, viral or not, from a police body cam, a dashcam, mobile phone or a security camera on a bank, that shows them to be right and that the police testimony about them is inaccurate, sometimes to the point of slander or criminal charges.
For white people with cordial relations with police, it must be a shock to learn from YouTube what every black citizen has known about police all of his or her life. In far too many cases since the video revolution, an officer who assaulted a suspect or a handcuffed prisoner, harassed a black person who was minding his own business, or tried to put an innocent citizen in prison, ends up legal jeopardy himself, but only because Orwell was wrong about one thing.
We’re looking back.