Why Are NSW Police Getting Body-Mounted Cameras And Going Through People’s Phone Data?

The topic of surveillance has reached fever pitch over the last twelve months. Phone-hacking scandals, NSA monitoring and creepy Facebook data mining — there are big stories and even bigger political capital at stake in the mass monitoring of populations around the world.

In a move that stirs equal parts repulsion and curiosity closer to home, the NSW government announced a $4 million plan in May to provide every frontline police officer with a body-mounted camera to record their interactions with civilians while on the job. The program was modelled on scores of similar successful programs across police departments in the US and UK, with the aim of increasing transparency as well as providing a greater source of video evidence in court.

Unlike more ubiquitous methods of surveillance, small, handheld or wearable cameras are accessible by even the most technologically dumbfounded to provide protection of their interests in the event of somebody else’s misbehaviour. Cyclists and motorists have been doing it for a while.

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What’s This Link Between Cameras And Crime?

For the small Californian city of Rialto, where police cameras have seen the most comprehensive testing yet, the emerging statistics are seriously compelling – over a twelve-month period, complaints made against police have dropped by 88% and use of officer force has fallen by an equally impressive 60%. Granted the results are not quite conclusive, but neither are they that surprising.

In criminology and basic parenting, it’s called deterrence – the use of fear of punishment or incrimination to put ‘em off bad behaviour in the first place. People behave differently when they believe they’re being recorded. But cameras aren’t really anything new in policing.

A spike in popularity of CCTV in the UK throughout the 1980s and 1990s saw an estimated 1.9 million CCTV cameras in operation by 2011 – or one for roughly every 32 Britons. Despite that, studies by the University of Cambridge in 2009 demonstrated that CCTV in public settings might not really do as much as hoped in deterring crime after all.

Besides making for some compelling YouTube viewing, it seems the police cameras are working, and there’s increasing evidence that the footage produced will play a key role in evidence presented before courts. As the New York Times noted, “experts increasingly say that body cameras are likely to become an industry standard over the coming years, just as cameras in patrol cars, which once prompted similar objections about privacy, have become commonplace in recent decades.”

There remain, however, some shaky questions about what happens to the footage.  Privacy concerns have surfaced in response to the cameras’ widespread adoption, especially in the United States, where implementation is still in a preliminary stage and similar technology like Google Glass is emerging simultaneously.

If we understand that somewhere between cat videos and internet porn, NSW Police are amassing an enormous, ever-growing digital repository of shaky, unscripted footage of their every single interaction with civilians, it remains unclear how the process will be regulated, the footage itself put to use, or indeed what will be done with it all as it begins to gather over time.

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Keep The Bastards Honest

It’s not just police that are using cameras to hold wrongdoers to account. A similar trend has emerged among the technologically enabled and politically entitled in the form of vengeful cyclists and motorists posting footage of wrongdoing on inner-city streets in Sydney and Melbourne. Among many others, a video posted to YouTube last month showed a cyclist ‘doored’ on Collins Street in Melbourne’s CBD by passengers leaving a taxi. The offending gentleman was soon revealed as a “65-year-old Brighton man” who has since handed himself into police following viral attention of the video online.

Similarly, footage emerged last year of a police officer – known only as Fairfield LAC 266 (the words on his badge) – brutally accosting teenager Jamie Jackson at the Sydney Mardi Gras parade in March. In the ensuing tumult across social and broadcast media ended in ‘disciplinary proceedings’ for the officer involved and charges laid against Jackson dropped.

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Police Surveillance: The Haystack And The Needle

Unless it’s all just a PR stunt for Andrew Scipione’s upcoming telemovie, we should be treating this new police technology with caution. For many matters involving crime cameras act as an impartial judge, and in the right hands, they can be empowering and hold to account those who would otherwise avoid penalty, or at the very least scrutiny. In the wrong hands, body-mounted cameras on NSW Police will be used as a legal weapon to protect officers’ interests on the frontline.

Revelations earlier this week that NSW Police were using metadata from “tower dumps” to track potential investigative leads further suggests that surveillance and surveillance technology has a big role to play in the future of law enforcement. The news also prompted Western Australian people’s hero and Greens communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam to aptly note that collecting metadata via tower dumps was like “collecting the entire haystack in order to find the needle.” Mass surveillance is quickly becoming a reality of our social contract, and the worst part is you’ll never know when you are being watched.

Privacy advocates are naturally horrified that potentially thousands of innocent people are having their call logs scrutinised – nobody needs to know that you ordered pizza delivery every night one month last summer, or that you once had a forty-five minute conversation with your housemate while he was three metres away in the bathroom of the same house.

It’s too early to tell whether the adoption of cameras for NSW Police will have a positive effect on the community – in reducing violent assaults in Sydney’s nightlife, incidents of abuse of powers and officer brutality, or indeed false complaints made against police. Either way, the next time you think you’ve found privacy eating your kebab on a night out in the Cross, think again.

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Tom Joyner is a writer from Sydney and is getting better at Twitter with practice @tomrjoyner.

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Feature image via the Daily Telegraph.