Recording Crime—Whose Crime?

When science fiction writer David Brin published his novel Earth in 1990, he had to make a lot of predictions, since he was setting the book in 2040. One of them was based on demographic trends that were already obvious when he wrote: that the proportion of older people would have increased significantly in 50 years.

He combined that with a technological change, so that seniors were constantly recording bad behavior out in public using cameras in their glasses. In the book, young people deride these people as "goggle-eye geeks." The constant surveillance brings youth backlash, but also has decreased crime.

We're now more than 30 years later than 1990, and people essentially do have video cameras with them all the time, though not yet worn in glasses the way Brin described. So far, that reality is not particularly impeding the sort of crime Brin had in mind.

What he missed was that it's police who need to be recorded. Recordings of police do have some effect, since they verify what Black Americans have been saying all along about how they are treated, and show that, all too often, police lie.

I thought of this when I heard about Arizona's newly signed law making it illegal for members of the public or press to record police interactions within 8'. As someone asked in another story I saw, will cops be running around to check that distance with a ruler? No, of course not. The law will be used inconsistently and probably in a discriminatory way. And it's absurdly unconstitutional: you can stand 5' away and use a phone for any other purpose except recording them, so this is about speech.

The fact that David Brin never thought of police crime as part of crime reveals something about his position in society, as well as the way police crime is hidden by media and state interests. I find myself thinking of this fact from Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of Civil Rights Corps: "Cops themselves steal more $$$ from people than all burglary combined."