A Future Worth Thinking About

“Any Sufficiently Advanced Police State…”
“…Is indistinguishable from a technocratic priestly caste?”
— Ingrid Burrington and Me, 04/17/15

As I said the other day, I’ve been thinking a lot about death, lately, because when two members of your immediate family die within weeks of each other, it gets into the mind. And when that’s woven through with more high-profile American police shootings, and then capped by an extremely suspicious death while in the custody of police, even more so, right? I’m talking about things like Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, and the decision in the Rekia Boyd case, all in a span of a few weeks.

So I’m thinking about the fact that everyone’s on the police bodycam trip, these days, especially in the USA–which, by the way will be the main realm of my discussion; I’m not yet familiar enough with their usage and proliferation in other countries to feel comfortable discussing them, so if any of you has more experience with and references to that, please feel free to present them in the comments, below. But, for now, here, more and more people are realizing that this is another instance of thinking a new technology will save us all, by the mere virtue of its existing. But as many people noted at Theorizing The Web, last week, when those in control of the systems of power start to vie for a thing just as much as those who were wanting to use that thing to Disrupt power? Maybe it’s not as disruptive a panacea as you thought.

We’ve previously discussed the nature of the Thick Blue Wall–the interconnected perspectives and epistemological foundations of those working on the prosecutorial side of the law, leading to lower likelihoods of any members of those groups being charged with wrongdoing, at all, let alone convicted. With that in mind, we might quickly come to a conclusion that wide proliferation of bodycams will only work if we, the public, have unfettered access to the datastream. But this position raises all of the known issues of that process inherently violating the privacy of the people being recorded. So maybe it’s better to say that bodycams absolutely will not work if the people in control of the distribution and usage of the recordings are the police, or any governing body allied with the police.

If those members of the authorities in charge of maintenance of the status quo are given the job of self oversight, then all we’ll have on our hands is a recapitulation of the same old problem–a Blue Firewall Of Silence. There’ll be a data embargo, with cops, prosecutors, judges, union reps getting to decide how much of which angles of whose videos are “pertinent” to any particular investigation and yeah, maybe you can make the “rest” of the tape available through some kind of Freedom Of Information Act-esque mechanism, but we have a clear vision of what that tends to look like, and exactly how long that process will take. We’re not exactly talking about Expedient Justice™, here.

So perhaps the real best bet, here, is to provide a completely disconnected, non-partisan oversight body, comprised of people from every facet of society, and every perspective on the law–at least those who still Believe that a properly-leveraged system of laws can render justice. So you get, say, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a PUBLIC defender, an exonerated formerly accused individual, a convicted felon, someone whose family member was wrongfully killed by the police, a judge, a cop. Different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, perceived disabilities. Run the full gamut, and create this body whose job it is to review these tapes and to decide by consensus what we get to see of them. Do this city by city. Make it a part of the infrastructure. Make sure we all know who they are, but never the exact details of their decision-making processes.

This of course gets immediately more complicated the more data we have to work with, and the more real-time analysis of it can be independently done, or intercepted by outside actors, and we of course have to worry about those people being influenced by those bad faith actors who would try to subvert our attempts at crafting justice… But the more police know that everything they do in every encounter they have with the public will be recorded, and that those recordings will be reviewed by an external review board, the closer we get to having consistent systems of accountability for those who have gotten Very used to being in positions of unquestioned, privileged, protected authority.

Either that, or we just create a conscious algorithmic system to do it, and hope for the best. But it seems like how I might have heard that that was a sticky idea, somewhere… One that people get really freaked out about, all the time. Hm.

All that being said, this is not to say that we ought not proliferate body cameras. It is to say that we must be constantly aware of the implications of our choices, and of the mechanisms by which we implement them. Because, if we’re not, then we run the risk of being at the mercy of a vastly interconnected and authoritarian technocracy, one which has the motive, means, and opportunity to actively hide anything it thinks we ought not concern ourselves with.

Maybe that sounds paranoid, but the possibility of that kind of closed-ranks overreach and our tendency toward supporting it–especially if it’s done in the name of “order”–are definitely there, and we’ll need to curtail them, if we want to consistently see anything like Justice.