I think we all, given a few minutes of reflection, would be glad that we're not judged on a 30 second edited video highlights reel of the worst decisions we've ever made. Particularly not one which stripped the context out of the video.
That said, I'm much less concerned about videotaping cops on the street and more concerned with VPI -- videotaped police interrogations. Unlike videotaping cops on the street, they'd mostly be to the benefit of poor & minority suspects rather than tech-savvy twentysomethings who enjoy protesting as a lifestyle. The imposition on the cops is minimal (since the interrogation is theoretically under their control) and the justice gains are huge, and this can be compellingly sold to the cops as in their best interests. (You'll clear more cases with less court time because routine videos of lying perps will cause most of them to take the freaking deal like you want them to.)
You know, I want every cop to wear a video recorder. I want this for accountability reasons, both as a protection to the ops, and as a protection to me. Of course I too don't want to be judged on a 30 second edited video, so I demand the right of "turnabout is fair play" and have me and others video tape the same cop at the same time. If the videos don't match, there is some 'splainin' to do.
I hadn't thought about videotaping interrogations. Interesting.
Perhaps the question is: what parts of police activity shouldn't be videotaped and published, and why? Undercover busts maybe. You can't spend five years growing a policeman into what looks like a drug dealer only to have him outed on YouTube in ten seconds. Or do we get rid of all undercover police work?
Even if you make drugs legal, we still need undercover operations to deal with criminal organisations. What about the groups that kill people for money, or extort 'protection money', or groups that rob banks? Unless you want to make murder, arson and theft legal, you need to go undercover in these groups.
1. I'm not saying that drugs themselves have to be legal. I think our current policy of punishing drug use is the bad thing. If drugs are to be illegal, the sensible thing is to punish production and sale. Then you can develop a dynamic where a user who wants to get clean can get some kind of reward for turning in a dealer. Then dealing becomes less attractive because there's a higher likelihood of being caught. Rehab the users, punish the providers makes more sense to me than Just punish everyone.
2. The original point was the idea that it might be a bad idea to video tape undercover officers. I think we've managed to stray from that a bit. I don't think we should concern ourselves with worrying about such video taping: either the criminal organization already cares about such things and can get that information readily, or they don't care and getting video taped once isn't going to change anything. Getting outed as an undercover agent pretty much destroys your chance to do that again, anyways, regardless of the presence of video taping (which I wouldn't expect to actually happen much in practice in these kinds of cases).
It's impossible even in principle to distinguish users from dealers. Users are constantly selling or giving drugs to each other, whether for a small profit, for mutual convenience, or to be friendly. They can't just introduce new people to their dealers because dealers don't want to meet lots of new people. If you put a bounty on dealers, people who are really just users will constantly be caught up and punished.
That is what happens today. Professional informants are paid to buy drugs and get the seller arrested for dealing. But because it's not that easy to find real dealers, they more often convince other users to sell to them. Someone who doesn't normally deal gets hit with a dealing charge.
As to the matter of videotaping undercover drug cops: this is really nothing to worry about. Drug dealers are not video taping their transactions. Citizen videotaping is something people do when they don't think they are doing anything wrong and they want evidence of possible police wrongdoing.
Then dealing becomes less attractive because there's a higher likelihood of being caught.
When there's no legal repercussion for turning in your dealer, only the most marginal and violent types will bother to be drug dealers, raising the price and violence of drug dealing, I would expect.
>What about the groups that kill people for money, or extort 'protection money', or groups that rob banks? Unless you want to make murder, arson and theft legal, you need to go undercover in these groups.
You watch too many movies. Such groups are extraordinarily rare, and it's even rarer that they'd be around long enough to actually infiltrate. The only real examples are organized crime, and almost universally a "man inside" is not an undercover cop, but a former member who's changed sides.
On-going investigations, like on-going military operations and the like, should be kept secret until they're finished. But they should be recorded and documented all the same. (And there should be limits so you can't say that a 50-year-old operation is 'on-going' or some such nonsense.)
Videotaping police interrogations is routine in my state, just as private citizens recording their own activities and interactions with other people (with or without the consent of the other parties in the interaction) is routine. The practice of routinely videotaping police interrogations in my jurisdiction seems to help considerably with the administration of criminal justice.
I think the issue is that at some point those videos are destroyed, and the only thing left from the interrogation is the police officers' notes and/or memory (and that of the suspect and/or their lawyer).
That said, I'm much less concerned about videotaping cops on the street and more concerned with VPI -- videotaped police interrogations. Unlike videotaping cops on the street, they'd mostly be to the benefit of poor & minority suspects rather than tech-savvy twentysomethings who enjoy protesting as a lifestyle. The imposition on the cops is minimal (since the interrogation is theoretically under their control) and the justice gains are huge, and this can be compellingly sold to the cops as in their best interests. (You'll clear more cases with less court time because routine videos of lying perps will cause most of them to take the freaking deal like you want them to.)