Nearly two millennia after Juvenal asked his question, "But who is to guard the guards themselves?" no society has proven able to satisfactorily answer it. Throughout the world, innocent people still suffer at the hands of their supposed protectors.
Take, for example, the Haitian police force and its accomplice attachés, or the military forces of the ousted Hutu majority in Rwanda, whose protection of the Tutsi minority was tantamount to slaughter. The English may set high standards for character, thoroughly train their police, and forbid them to carry guns, yet bobbies are still accused of roughing up civilians and manufacturing evidence against suspects. (Witness the case of the Guildford Four, imprisoned wrongly by English courts in the 1970s and dramatized in the movie In the Name of the Father.) In the United States, civil rights laws, civilian review boards, and "cultural sensitivity training" still fall short in stemming police brutality. Around the world there is little to prevent cops from intimidating, harassing, robbing, framing, and victimizing those whom they are sworn to defend.
But what if someone were watching? What if society were to find a way to manifest the "fair witness" that was first conceived by Robert Heinlein in his seminal science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. A fair witness was a person trained to observe and remember events without prejudice or bias. What if it were possible to have a fair witness next to every policeman in the world? What if that fair witness were a machine?
We may live in the digital age, but police have not generally availed themselves of the most modern equipment available. Some civil libertarians might call this is a good thing, arguing that arming cops with advanced technology, especially for surveillance, only gives them new ways to abuse our rights.
Another viewpoint, however, welcomes at least some high-tech police tools, especially those with two-way capacity. Properly deployed, a suite of high-tech devices can be our electronic fair witness to catch the bad cops red-handed and protect the good ones from false accusations.
Today's audio-video technologies make it feasible for juries to vicariously relive police actions. Imagine the courtroom scenes if a police helmet was equipped with a tiny video camera, perched like some mystical third eye in the center of the officer's forehead. Add a supersensitive microphone next to each ear and, sprouting from the top of the helmet, various communications antennae. Imagine if everything the officer saw and heard was captured for later review.
Depending on a police department's budget, audio-video data could be monitored and recorded at a central site, transmitted to a locked and hardened recorder in the officer's car, or kept in a secure video recorder carried by the officer. Recording would be continuous throughout an officer's shift (except under tightly defined exceptions). Tapes would be held in the custody of a neutral agency for possible later examination. A given percentage of the tapes would be selected at random to review general police conduct. If no disputes arose after a reasonable time, tapes would be erased and recycled.
No longer would juries have to rely on witness testimony, as they have historically, to decide what really happened during encounters between civilians and police. (Fearing crime more than they do the cops, juries often give officers an overly generous benefit of the doubt; police rarely lose such "swearing matches.")
Juries could become "virtual" witnesses in the police cases for which they have to return a verdict. Did the man resist arrest? Was the woman fondled by the policeman? Where was the dope? Who uttered a racial epithet? These questions, and others, would no longer be open to conjecture. The jury would know.
Current and emerging technologies can provide digital answers to these questions. The Global Positioning System is a US$13 billion satellite navigation system created by the US Department of Defense. At its best, the system's hand-held units can determine their longitude, latitude, and altitude to within a few meters. Unfortunately, performance degrades in high-rise urban environments. Coupled with a cell-phone uplink, the Global Positioning System can automatically give periodic location updates. When desired, it can be "pinged" from the station house.
Meanwhile, just down the road from George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, a start-up company, co-founded by Bob Fleming, is developing an entirely new positioning technology. The original idea was to use the technology to precisely position ballet dancers' bodies and limbs in space, according to Fleming. With error margins of less than a centimeter, they will be able to create computer-generated playbacks of performances. These computerized recordings will allow the dancers to be viewed from any angle, or their moves edited for instructional or creative purposes.
Fleming's company also foresees the technology's use in law enforcement, especially given that one of its curious properties - its locational accuracy is relatively unaffected by intervening buildings or terrain - make it ideal for urban police work. These developers are watching out for your neighborhood watch commanders, who want to know three things about their officers: location, location, and location. But in the heat of a chase or violent encounter, it's not always possible for the police to report - or even know - where they are. The inability to find an officer can be fatal.
But Fleming et al. aren't satisfied with merely knowing an officer's location. They envision the continuous recording of a cop's bodily movements - just like the ballet dancers - throughout a shift. They believe that single-chip, coin-sized versions of their units will be made cheaply enough for each officer to wear several on their uniforms and equipment - wrists, elbows, ankles, knees, heads, torsos, hips, guns, nightsticks. An officer's every move will be captured. Unlike video, this technology works in the dark and does not depend on the direction the cop's camera is facing. With such a recording, many crucial questions can be answered. Did the officer violate department policy by clubbing a suspect with an overhand blow to the head? Did she shoot someone who was already wounded on the ground? Was he facing in the right direction to have seen the suspect he claims to have identified?
Many may worry that as technology becomes more and more prevalent in our lives, so does Big Brother. But technology may yet prove to be the best way to guard the guards themselves.
