Recording the police has got be a good thing almost all the time. Unless they can "accidentally" not record an encounter or "accidentally" delete one, it will most certainly place moral pressure on the officers.
We all know they have never had legal a duty to protect any civilian, but whenever it was that police subtly turned from a "protect and serve" ideology into "law enforcement" was a dark transition for America.
This reminds me of the controversy that happened when the CIA videotaped "enhanced interrogation techniques" and 90 of the videos got mysteriously destroyed. Noone was ever held criminally responsible for that [1].
There's a definite need that the video should be streamed as backup to a department (or more neutral 3rd party) database or made incapable of being deleted.
If officer recording becomes the norm though, an "accidentally" deleted recording is going to be viewed with a lot of suspicion by the courts and is going to put a lot more weight onto any testimony against you.
And a correlation between citizen complaints and a particular officer having mysteriously incomplete records is going to look bad in front of a jury.
What will happen is that police chiefs will simply tell problem officers that if they are going to "forget" to turn on cameras when interacting with citizens, they best "forget" to show up to work that day.
It also ha the benefit of making citizens act better as well. The article said it's basically a win, win situation. The only people that would be against this are corrupt cops and their overlords (i.e. Bloomberg).
From a UI/UX standpoint, it might let the officers feel more in control, but manual activation makes the system much more prone to error. I think it would be best to have constant activation.
I don't think there should be constant activation. Only during confrontation. It'd take the fun out of the job. I wouldn't want all the stupid shit and banter I say between my friends and I on a daily basis to be recorded. When on breaks, just chilling in the car.
I know this is a silly concern, but I'm a sworn protector of the chill.
This can be handled through key management. Give officers an option to switch on a privacy mode through a "key fob" which basically just manages encryption keys. "Privacy mode" time spans are just encrypted with an additional key. If a court proceeding wants something from a "privacy mode" time, they can still request it.
This would prevent officers using this feature to hide improper procedure while also preventing other officers from using the device to eavesdrop.
We all know they have never had legal a duty to protect any civilian, but whenever it was that police subtly turned from a "protect and serve" ideology into "law enforcement" was a dark transition for America.